Sold for $375,000

Provenance:
Saks Galleries, Denver, Colorado

This painting will be included in Phyllis Braff, Melissa Speidel Webster and Stephen Good's forthcoming catalogue raisonne of the artist's works. 

Thomas Moran visited Zion, then in the Utah Territory, only once, in July, 1873, while on his way to join John Wesley Powell’s U.S. Geological Survey Expedition to the Grand Canyon. The artist would travel to and paint the Grand Canyon many times, often annually, but Zion was somewhat off the beaten path and not as readily accessible by train. Still, scenes from Zion in watercolor and oil punctuate Moran’s entire career. Moran’s onsite sketches and small watercolors of the Kolob and Zion Canyons, and photographs taken by expedition photographer John K. Hillers proved an ongoing wellspring of inspiration for the artist. It is as if Zion, for Moran, was at once a place and a kind of unfinished canvas in a recurring dream, one on which Moran could project and paint an inner vision, a dreamscape, as it were, of a remote, otherworldly West. 

     Under the influence of two giants of British art, painter J.M.W. Turner and philosopher and art critic John Ruskin, Moran never strove for fidelity to the scene in his landscapes. Echoing Turner and Ruskin, Moran averred, “I place no value on literal transcripts from Nature. My general scope is not realistic; all my tendencies are toward idealization… Topography in art is valueless.” Instead, from his earliest sketches in Utah—and everywhere else—Moran sought poetic interpretations. If poetry required the amendment or rearrangement of elements in the natural world, so be it. Art above all. Nevertheless, Moran’s interpretations were—and remain—crucial in the drive to capture the popular imagination of the West. With his engravings in periodicals of the day and the unparalleled Prang lithographs, one can ask, in all seriousness, “Would there be a National Park System without Thomas Moran’s visions of wilderness?”

     Zion became Zion National Park, Utah’s first, in 1919. It was timely, and perhaps only natural, that Thomas Moran would paint View of Zion, 1919 to remember his time there and commemorate the occasion. 

     Aspects of many of his earlier renderings of Zion appear in the painting. The geological formation right of center recalls Moran’s watercolor, Coburn’s Butte, South Utah, 1873, while its shape and the river snaking at its foot harkens back to an 1874 Utah watercolor, Valley of Babbling Waters. The brume from the 1892 painting Mist in Kanab Canyon softens Moran’s palette and the oncoming storm at left and the shadows it casts hint at the drama of the monumental Grand Canyon canvases. 

     It is as if, just as those first sketches became paintings, those first paintings, in their turn, furnished the reference material for his aesthetic imagination in subsequent works. Paintings, rather than place, begat paintings. Once Zion becomes Thomas Moran’s Zion, a place filtered through his art, it becomes its own Zion to anyone and everyone who visits the park. You might say Moran’s Zion becomes America’s Zion. 

     View of Zion, 1919, painted just as place became park, is, however, unpeopled and all but devoid of vegetation save for the suggestion of mossiness in the shallow hill at right. Moran had once said, “Southern Utah is where Nature reveals herself in all her tumultuous and awe-inspiring grandeur…” one that “is worth going a long distance to see.” View of Zion, 1919 emerges, in the end, as a temptation to adventurous spirits, to a place that is both geographic and geological and yet, beyond geography and geology, a place in the mind’s eye when we are far from the wilderness, calling out to us, “Ollie ollie oxenfree, if you dare you might find me…”