Mountain Of The Holy Cross, Colorado

Title

Mountain Of The Holy Cross, Colorado

Artist

Eric Glaser

Medium

Painting - Watercolor Over Graphite

Description

"Mountain of the Holy Cross, Colorado"

Note: Mount of the Holy Cross is a high and prominent mountain summit in the northern Sawatch Range of the Rocky Mountains of North America. It was named for the distinctive cross-shaped snowfield on its northeast face. Under USDA Forest Service administration, the mountain was proclaimed "Holy Cross National Monument" by Herbert Hoover on May 11, 1929. The monument was transferred to the National Park Service in 1933. In 1950, it was returned to the Forest Service and lost its National Monument status—the number of visitors to the mountain and the nearby "Pilgrim's Hut" had waned, and the expense of full-time staff could not be justified.

This mountain has been the subject of painters, photographers and even a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ("The Cross of Snow"). The first publicly available photograph was published in National Geographic magazine. Thomas Moran depicted the mountain in an oil painting, which now is part of the collection of the Museum of the American West, part of the Autry National Center in Los Angeles, California. It is still much photographed but it is not as well known today as it was in the past. (Wikipedia)

Artist: Thomas Moran (American, born England, 1837 - 1926)

Title: Mountain of the Holy Cross

Object Type: Watercolor Painting

Genre: Landscape Art

Date: 1890

Medium: watercolor and gouache over graphite on paper

Dimensions: Height: 45 cm (17.7 in); Width: 31.1 cm (12.2 in)

Inscription: lower right in watercolor: T Moran (TYM monogram)

Collection: National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

Credit Line: Avalon Fund, Florian Carr Fund, Barbara and Jack Kay Fund, and Gift of Max and Heidi Berry.

Thomas Moran was an American painter and printmaker of the Hudson River School in New York whose work often featured the Rocky Mountains. Moran and his family, wife Mary Nimmo Moran and daughter Ruth, took residence in New York where he obtained work as an artist. He was a younger brother of the noted marine artist Edward Moran, with whom he shared a studio.

A talented illustrator and exquisite colorist, Thomas Moran was hired as an illustrator at Scribner's Monthly. During the late 1860s, he was appointed the chief illustrator for the magazine, a position that helped him launch his career as one of the premier painters of the American landscape, in particular, the American West.

Moran along with Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Hill, and William Keith are sometimes referred to as belonging to the Rocky Mountain School of landscape painters because of all of the Western landscapes made by this group.

From the National Gallery of Art:

Thomas Moran saw the wondrous landscape that the world would come to know as Yellowstone National Park for the first time in the summer of 1871. He had journeyed west to join F. V. Hayden's survey expedition bound for a region rumored to contain steaming geysers and boiling mud pots. Traveling by train and stagecoach, he arrived in Virginia City, Montana, where he met William Henry Jackson, a young photographer whom Hayden had hired to document the purported "Wonders of Yellowstone." Moran and Jackson quickly became a team, working side by side to select subjects for photographs and sketches. Together they gathered the first visual evidence confirming stories of an astonishing region in the Far West full of geological marvels.

Hayden, Moran, and Jackson returned east in the fall of 1871. Required to submit a report to Congress, Hayden supplemented his survey data with photographs taken by Jackson. Soon Congress began drafting legislation to protect Yellowstone. In support of the proposal, Jackson's photographs and Moran's watercolors (the only color images available) were passed among congressmen on Capitol Hill. With nearly unprecedented speed, Congress approved a bill declaring Yellowstone the nation's first national park in the spring of 1872.

Moran's watercolors of Yellowstone were so admired that within a short period of time the artist received multiple invitations to join government-sponsored expeditions to western territories. In 1873 he accompanied John Wesley Powell on a journey down the Colorado River to the Grand Canyon. That same year, William Henry Jackson photographed Colorado's "Mountain of the Holy Cross." When Moran saw the photograph, he quickly recognized a subject perfectly suited to his brush. The following year he traveled to the Rocky Mountains, where he undertook an arduous climb to complete field studies of the celebrated mountain with a cross of snow near its summit.

During the following decades Moran traveled west many times. In the field and later in his studio, he produced a number of stunning watercolors that introduced the remarkable canyons, peaks, and geysers of the Far West to the American people. Critically important as historical documents, Moran's western watercolors are also among the most beautiful paintings produced during the nineteenth century.

Text Credit: Google Arts & Culture, National Gallery of Art

Image Credit: National Gallery of Art

Additional image editing by Eric Glaser

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May 15th, 2020

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