Here, the chilly blue grays, dull browns, and soft tans of the mountains provide a striking backdrop to the rich olive greens of a ragged group of trees and the gleaming white boulders strewn across the hillside. The largest of these boulders dwarfs two diminutive figures huddled at its base. These tiny figures were perhaps intended to represent Thomas and his brother, the artist Peter Moran (1841–1914), as this was their first trip together to the West.¹

Arriving by rail to Lake Tahoe in August 1879, the brothers set off on horseback to explore the Sierra Nevada mountains, then proceeded to Utah’s Wasatch Range and Cottonwood Canyon, with Thomas declaring the area delightfully “picturesque.”² The word picturesque had a very specific meaning in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially to a landscape artist. Moran would have understood it to denote a landscape characterized by an irregularity of forms, rough textures, and with strong contrasts of light and dark, all of which he portrays in Upper End of Cottonwood Canyon.³

—Sandra Pauly, Henry Luce Foundation Curatorial Scholar for Moran Collection Research, 2021

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¹ Peter made a series of trips to the West, including this one with Thomas in 1879. He returned on his own in 1880, 1881, and 1890. Although some sources indicate Peter visited the West in 1864, David Gilmour Wright corrects this misperception. Peter did travel in 1864, but it was to England, not the West. Wright, Domestic and Wild, 1:32–45.
² Quoted in Wilkins, Thomas Moran: Artist of the Mountains, 178. The Gilcrease owns three other sketches of the area by Thomas: Near the Summit of Cottonwood Canyon (02.890),In Little Cottonwood Canyon (02.887), and Toledo Mine, Cottonwood Canyon, Utah (02.889).
³ In the eighteenth century, the British aestheticians Edmund Burke, Uvedale Price, and Richard Payne Knight defined three types of landscape, and these categories continued to be used in Europe and the United States throughout the nineteenth century, although modifications were not uncommon. In general, in addition to the “picturesque,” there was the “beautiful,” characterized by smooth, curving lines, harmony of color, and calm settings of limited scale, and the panoramic vistas of the “sublime,” defined by extremes of height or depth and dramatic atmospheric conditions. Rainey, Creating “Picturesque America,” 27–28.