Thomas Moran’s depictions of the Green River area number more than one hundred and include oil paintings, etchings, wood engravings, chromolithographs, and sketches.¹ The artist not only portrayed the region frequently but also visited on several occasions, including in 1881 after an exhausting year of travel finding vistas to sketch for three separate commissions. Moran first journeyed to Niagara Falls that year, then traveled to the Virginias and Maryland, with his last trip an excursion through Colorado and New Mexico. Before he headed home to the East Coast, however, he took a detour to Wyoming’s Green River, where he had first sketched the American West a decade earlier.

In this intriguing watercolor from the 1881 visit, Moran depicts the buttes at Green River in two distinct registers, one above the other, capturing something of the sweeping line of these “castles” of the western landscape. The artist generally portrayed the waterway in the foreground, with Castle Rock, the largest of the formations, on the opposite shore, and the smaller buttes of the Palisades in the distance. Here he renders the buttes from behind, and we cannot see the river. Moran periodically employed the odd compositional device of inserting one sketch above another, even as early as 1862 when he sketched Great Britain’s castle, Windsor (13.895). Moreover, the forms of the towering edifices in this watercolor bear a striking resemblance to Moran’s sketches of European citadels such as the Palace of the Caesars, Rome (02.941) and Conwy Castle (02.804).

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

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¹ Kinsey, Thomas Moran and the Surveying of the American West, 29. The best known of the oil paintings are Cliffs of Green River, Wyoming (1909–10), which is part of the White House Collection, Washington, D.C., and Green River Cliffs, Wyoming (1881; 2011.2.1), in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. The following Green River artworks (02.885, 02.898, 02.891, 02.930, 13.551, 13.964, 13.909, 13.910, 13.911, 13.913, 13.970, 14.437a, and 15.414) are in the Gilcrease collection.