The engaging composition and dramatic contrasts between light and dark make Solitude a wonderful example of Thomas Moran’s accomplishments as a lithographer. The rocky outcropping in the foreground and the winding stream beside it lead our eye to the tree clinging perilously to the shoreline. This pine draws our attention upward to its darker companion, whose canopy it appears to grasp with outstretched limbs in an attempt to halt its descent into the creek. The mountains in the distance stand mute witness to the struggle, while to the right a dying pine appears to be a sign of what is to come. Indeed, the work has been interpreted by Moran scholar Joni Kinsey as a memento mori, a reflection on the inevitability of death.¹

Interpreting Solitude’s pines in such an anthropomorphic manner has its appeal, but the work is also a fine example of Moran’s mastery of lithography. Invented in 1798 by Alois Senefelder of Germany, lithography became popular in the United States by the 1840s.² Moran created lithographs for about ten years, beginning around 1859 and culminating with a series created for and printed by James McGuigan of Philadelphia.³ Solitude is one of the McGuigan prints, and Gilcrease owns four others: On the Susquehanna (14.638), In the Forest of the Wissahickon (14.634d), Bay of Baiae, Naples (14.637d), and Desolation (14.636).⁴

—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, 36–37. Kinsey suggests that the canopied pine here was inspired by Moran’s Pines in the Villa Borghese, Rome (02.868).
² T. Victoria Hansen, “Thomas Moran and Nineteenth-Century Printmaking,” 16.
³ T. Victoria Hansen, “Thomas Moran and Nineteenth-Century Printmaking,” 16.
⁴ By stylistic comparison to Solitude, Nancy Friese dates Desolation to 1869 and includes it in the McGuigan group; see Morand and Friese, The Prints of Thomas Moran, 72.