Chasm of the Colorado

The Chasm of the Colorado by Thomas Moran: Introduction

Thomas Moran’s The Chasm of the Colorado turns the Grand Canyon into a landscape of broken rock, deep shadow and changing weather. Dated 1873–1874, the immense oil painting followed his first visit to the canyon with John Wesley Powell in 1873. Moran intended it as a companion to his celebrated Yellowstone canvas. Both works belong to the U.S. Department of the Interior Museum, which records the Colorado painting as oil on canvas mounted on aluminium. ^[1]

The picture is more unsettled than its Yellowstone companion. A storm descends over the left side while clearer light opens across the right. Between them, successive terraces, towers and clefts compete for attention. The Colorado River is reduced to a narrow glimpse far below. Moran makes the canyon impressive through this difficult combination of breadth and depth, rather than through one isolated mountain or a centrally placed waterfall.

At a Glance

• ArtistThomas Moran
• TitleThe Chasm of the Colorado
• Date1873–1874; completed in 1874
• MediumOil on canvas, currently mounted on aluminium
• Size84⅜ × 144¾ inches
• CollectionU.S. Department of the Interior Museum
• SubjectThe Grand Canyon of the Colorado River
• Congressional purchase1874, for $10,000
• CompanionThe Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, 1872

Contents

1. The journey behind the painting
2. Drawing, colour notes and photographs
3. A rocky foreground without an easy entrance
4. Reading the terraces and the distant river
5. Storm on the left, open light on the right
6. From charcoal design to a finished canvas
7. What did contemporary viewers believe?
8. Artistic truth and literal topography
9. Exhibition and congressional purchase
10. A companion, not the only Grand Canyon painting

The journey behind the painting

Moran first visited the Grand Canyon in 1873. He did not accompany Powell on the famous 1869 journey down the Colorado River. That earlier expedition belonged to Powell’s experience before the two men travelled together. Confusing the journeys gives the painter an adventure he did not undertake and obscures the more specific circumstances in which he gathered material for this canvas. ^[2]

His decision to join Powell also involved practical commitments. In a June 1873 letter to Hayden, transcribed in the National Gallery catalogue, Moran explained that he had already agreed to supply many pictures of the region. He needed to reach the canyon in time to begin those commissions. The choice was not simply a spontaneous departure in pursuit of a sublime view. Travel, contracts and the prospect of new subjects were already connected.

The journey took him through demanding terrain before he reached a view of the Colorado in early August. In a letter home, he described the depth of the chasm, the distant river and the impression of stillness punctuated by a subdued roar. His account moved between what he could see and what he understood about the river’s actual movement. Water that appeared to move slowly from above was, he explained, a powerful torrent below.

This contrast between appearance and knowledge is central to the finished painting. The river is small within the panorama, but its smallness does not mean it is insignificant. The canyon’s dimensions alter the spectator’s perception. Looking from the rim, both movement and size become difficult to judge. Moran had to make an exhibition picture from an experience that challenged ordinary comparisons.

Drawing, colour notes and photographs

The same letter explains that Moran made an outline and some colour work, while photographs would provide details if he chose to paint the view. These were complementary records. A monochrome photograph could retain forms; a colour note could preserve distinctions that the photograph did not offer. The letter does not establish that a single surviving photograph was copied throughout the completed canvas. ^[2]

His working material also fed a large programme of illustration. A later letter listed drawings promised to Powell and to several publishers, alongside watercolours and oils. The great painting therefore emerged from a wider body of work. A printed illustration might isolate a particular formation or explain a stage in a journey; the monumental canvas had to hold a spectator’s attention as a coherent landscape.

Kevin J. Avery’s study of Moran’s Colburn’s Butte, South Utah provides a close example of that broader process. Avery follows a subject associated with the 1873 journey through a pencil sketch, a watercolour, a drawing prepared for reproduction and a published wood engraving. These are related objects in different media, not interchangeable versions with identical purposes. His proposed identification of the landmark remains an argued identification rather than a fact established by this painting. ^[3]

That example helps explain why the phrase “based on sketches” can be too simple. Field records could be transformed more than once, with changes required by size, medium and destination. A small sheet that was easy to carry was not a miniature exhibition canvas waiting only to be enlarged. Likewise, an engraving designed for a printed page had demands of its own. The movement from travel to finished image involved selection at every stage.

None of this makes the Colorado canvas a mechanical assemblage of documents. Its storm, illuminated plateaux and deep openings have to work together for a viewer standing before one surface. The records gave Moran material, but the final organisation belongs to the painting. Following that distinction allows us to value its observed subject without treating every relationship as a surveyed measurement.

A rocky foreground without an easy entrance

Across the lower edge, broad rock surfaces seem close enough to step onto. They are fractured into blocks and shelves, with small patches of vegetation interrupting the harder forms. The warm light touching some surfaces makes them distinct, while others sink into brown and blue-grey shadow. These changes give the foreground weight before the eye begins to explore the distance.

Yet the apparent foothold is insecure. Behind the nearest ledges, openings fall into dark clefts. A substantial block near the lower centre sits above a space whose depth is hard to determine. At the right, a rock face cuts into the foreground and separates the spectator from the more open plateau beyond. Instead of providing a smooth road into the landscape, Moran repeatedly brings the eye to an edge.

This makes the viewer’s position different from that in The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. Yellowstone’s shaded ledge and small people give a relatively legible place from which to contemplate the falls. The Colorado foreground offers less reassurance. We can identify nearby surfaces, but the spaces beyond them open in several directions, and no prominent group of spectators establishes a simple human measure.

Small vegetation remains visible near the bottom and on some ledges. It should not be erased from the description merely because nineteenth-century critics stressed desolation. Nor should an image of apparently uninhabited terrain be treated as evidence that the region had no human history. Moran’s selection of a view and the critics’ emotional responses are different matters from the history of people who knew and lived in the canyon country.

Reading the terraces and the distant river

The central landscape is built from repeated horizontal layers broken by steep vertical faces. Some formations rise like towers; others spread into shelves or recede behind intervening ridges. Moran alternates surfaces that catch light with surfaces that turn away from it. The result is a sequence of advances and withdrawals rather than a uniform wall of rock.

A dark, sloping mass near the right centre descends towards the deepest opening. Its upper edge leads towards a reddish formation crowned by narrow upright shapes. Below, successive bands register the structure of the slope. The diagonals draw attention into the chasm, while the layered upper surfaces keep the painting’s breadth visible. Depth and lateral extension have to be read together.

Farther back, pale yellow and pink forms become softer and less individually distinct. A long, relatively level skyline stretches across the distance beneath the clearer sky. The repeated layers appear smaller as they recede, but no single comparison makes the whole panorama easy to measure. That difficulty is part of the picture’s effect, and it became a major issue for contemporary reviewers.

The river appears low within the central darkness as a small, light passage. It is not a broad blue band winding conveniently through every part of the scene. Its limited visibility makes the scale of the enclosing rock more forceful. The title’s emphasis on a chasm is appropriate: the painting asks us to attend to the immense space cut between masses, even where its lower course remains partly concealed.

The visible layering does not authorise a complete geological diagnosis from the reproduction. Early critics sometimes used volcanic comparisons when describing the picture’s drama. Their words record nineteenth-century responses, not a reliable classification of every depicted formation. The distinction matters because Moran’s canyon was discussed as both an artistic spectacle and a document of nature.

Storm on the left, open light on the right

The weather is one of the painting’s strongest organising features. Dark clouds gather across the upper left, with vertical curtains of rain descending towards the canyon. Their softer edges contrast with the hard forms below. A pale, warm passage within the rain introduces a change of light, while parts of the rocky distance emerge through the shifting veil.

To the right, the sky opens into a clearer blue-green area with scattered light cloud. The distant plateau is easier to follow beneath it. The composition therefore contains several conditions at once: shadow, rainfall, mist and brighter air. The storm does not cover the whole landscape, and its partial extent allows Moran to make weather a spatial event.

Cloud and rock also share forms without becoming identical. The swelling dark clouds above the left side echo the massing of the towers below, but their edges remain unstable. Thin pale vapour appears between some formations, making depth visible through concealment. Water is present as river, rain and suspended mist, even though stone occupies most of the painted surface.

These changes affect the spectator’s emotional response. The right-hand distance offers an opening, while the storm and deep foreground clefts keep the view unsettled. Moran does not make the canyon uniformly hostile or uniformly inviting. The same landscape can offer brilliant passages of light and spaces that are difficult to comprehend. Its drama comes from their coexistence.

One way to follow the design is to begin with the clearer right-hand sky and move left along the horizon. The distant layers become interrupted by nearer formations, and then by rain. A broad view gradually gives way to partial views. Reversing the movement, from the storm towards the open sky, produces a different experience: the obscured landscape seems to emerge rather than disappear. The painting allows both readings without fixing a narrative sequence of changing weather.

The lower half supplies a further contrast. Here the eye moves across recognisable surfaces but encounters sudden dark openings beneath them. The upper distance extends the field of vision; the foreground repeatedly interrupts it. This combination makes the canvas more than an illustration of a storm. Its breadth encourages exploration, while its clefts make that exploration difficult. The spectator can scan the whole rectangle yet remain uncertain about how its separate spaces connect below the visible ledges.

A reproduction cannot tell us whether the cloud forms were painted from one particular storm, or whether every weather effect belonged to a single observed moment. The picture supplies a designed relationship between conditions. Its convincing movement should be distinguished from evidence about the exact day, hour or sequence of observations used to create it.

From charcoal design to a finished canvas

By late November 1873, Moran reported that he had finished the design in charcoal. Powell visited the work during this period. According to the artist’s ledger, as discussed in the National Gallery catalogue, painting began in January 1874. These stages explain the current date of 1873–1874: the design and the completed oil belong to a process that crossed the turn of the year. ^[2]

The large format was closely related to the Yellowstone picture’s size. Moran called the new work a companion and intended it to have a comparable public presence. This was an artistic decision as well as a commercial one. A successful companion needed enough similarity to invite pairing and enough difference to justify another prolonged encounter with a western landscape.

The use of a charcoal design points to preparation on the scale of the finished work. A portable sketch could preserve an incident; a large arrangement had to determine how the incidents would relate across the canvas. Where the main masses fall, how much sky remains and how the storm balances the brighter plateau are decisions that affect the entire image.

Moran’s progress also shows how misleading it is to imagine the painting made at the canyon rim. The journey supplied experience and records; the months after his return supplied design, enlargement and execution. Its convincing immediacy belongs to the finished effect. The object’s history contains a much longer interval of work than the single moment of looking that the picture seems to offer.

The current museum description of canvas mounted on aluminium records the painting’s support today. It does not turn the work into an original nineteenth-century metal-panel painting. Equally, the listed dimensions describe this particular object, not every Grand Canyon canvas Moran produced. His repeated treatment of the region makes careful identification especially important. ^[1]

Watch: Thomas Moran

Choose a film to explore the artist’s work, its interpretation and its wider setting.

The painting that inspired a National Park

Smarthistory

A close discussion of Moran’s landscape and its relationship to the idea of Yellowstone.

Watch on YouTube

▶01 · WatchLooking at YellowstoneSmarthistory▶02 · WatchMoran at the museumThe San Diego Museum of Art

What did contemporary viewers believe?

The first responses to The Chasm of the Colorado did not agree about its success. The National Gallery catalogue preserves transcriptions of contemporary reviews, allowing the disagreement to be read alongside the painting. A Newark response in May 1874 praised the courage of attempting such an expansive scene. The same review recognised that the picture needed to make viewers believe in forms and colours unfamiliar to them. ^[2]

The New York Times review of 18 May took a different position. It questioned whether the painting conveyed the canyon’s actual height and extent, arguing that the scene could appear to be a comparatively limited rocky passage. The critic did not dismiss Moran’s technical ability; the objection concerned what that ability had achieved. A canvas could be skilfully painted yet fail, in this reviewer’s view, to communicate a convincing scale.

This is a useful criticism to test through looking. Without a large figure, familiar building or other repeated human measure, how does the spectator estimate the depth? Trees and ledges offer some clues, but they cannot make a vast landscape instantly measurable. The viewer must infer distance from diminishing forms, overlap and changing clarity. The painting’s ambition also creates its difficulty.

Other reviews gave the work almost documentary authority. A Scribner’s response treated its detailed rock surfaces as evidence of geological accuracy, while also describing an overwhelming, unfamiliar scene. That judgement should be attributed to the critic rather than accepted as a substitute for modern geological analysis. It shows the extent to which a convincing painted surface could be understood as knowledge.

Clarence Cook’s extended response was mixed. He admired particular effects of sky, cloud and mist while finding the whole composition crowded and difficult. His comparison with Dante’s infernal landscape belongs to a literary way of understanding the scene. It expresses the force and discomfort of his encounter with the picture, not an objective description of the canyon’s character.

The surviving responses therefore place the painting between several expectations. It was supposed to reveal a distant landscape, demonstrate artistic skill, make its scale believable and offer an emotionally compelling experience. A reviewer could praise one achievement while doubting another. The congressional purchase that followed did not make these disagreements disappear.

Artistic truth and literal topography

Moran’s own statement in G. W. Sheldon’s American Painters helps explain why he might not have accepted literal transcription as the ultimate test. Published in 1879, the passage describes his general tendency towards idealisation. His observations of nature supplied material, but the finished work pursued an artistic effect beyond simple duplication. ^[4]

Applied to this canvas, that outlook encourages questions about relationships rather than a search for exact photographic equivalence. How does the storm alter the apparent depth? Why is the foreground broken by such strong dark openings? How do the lit terraces hold the composition together? These questions attend to the painting as an arrangement without denying the real landscape behind it.

They also leave room for criticism. An artist’s declared method does not automatically prove that every composition succeeds. Cook could recognise Moran’s skill and still find the view insufficiently unified. The Times could accept the challenge of the subject and still ask whether the picture communicated its scale. Those responses address the design on its own terms as well as its relationship to nature.

The tension is more interesting than a simple choice between accurate and exaggerated. A painting can preserve observed forms while changing their relationships, and it can communicate a powerful sense of place without serving as a reliable map. Conversely, spectacular colour does not establish the identity of a pigment or the accuracy of a geological claim. Different kinds of truth require different kinds of evidence.

Exhibition and congressional purchase

Moran first showed the completed painting to friends and neighbours in Newark at the end of April 1874. It then went on public view and was exhibited in New York before travelling to Washington’s Corcoran Gallery. This sequence followed the broad pattern he had established with Yellowstone: local and metropolitan attention preceded the approach to a national audience. ^[2]

The artist also worked actively to promote the new picture. Before it was finished, a photograph associated with the developing work was used to bring it to the attention of a congressional contact. Such activity belongs to its history as much as the journey or studio work. Moran understood that a monumental painting required an audience and, ideally, a purchaser able to accommodate it.

In July 1874, reports announced that Congress had bought the canvas for $10,000. The purchase made it a public companion to the Yellowstone painting acquired two years earlier. It was not the commission that originally sent Moran into the field. The artist had gathered material, designed the work, painted it and exhibited it before the sale was secured.

The pairing offered two different western landscapes at comparable scale. Yellowstone organised wonder around brilliant canyon walls and a distant waterfall. Colorado presented broken terrain under changing weather, with the river largely concealed below. Their relationship depended on both likeness and difference. Viewed together, they expanded the range of what a national landscape picture could present.

A companion, not the only Grand Canyon painting

Moran returned to Grand Canyon subjects over many years. The Philadelphia Museum of Art holds a distinct large painting dated 1892 and 1908, reflecting work and later reworking. It should not be substituted for the 1873–1874 Colorado canvas simply because both concern the canyon and use related titles. The date, composition and collection identify separate objects. ^[5]

His Grand Canyon of the Colorado River page explores that later picture. Comparing them gives more than a second illustration of the same place. It allows attention to what Moran chose to emphasise at different moments: the organisation of rock masses, the balance of sky and land, and the paths by which light leads through a vast subject.

The Colorado canvas also invites comparison with Mountain of the Holy Cross, completed in 1875. That upright painting follows a stream towards a distant summit, giving the eye a more continuous route through the landscape. Its contemporary reviews returned to the problem of believable distance. Together, the three works show Moran testing different ways to make an unfamiliar western scene legible on a large canvas.

The two congressional paintings transferred to the Department of the Interior in 1950, according to the museum’s collection records. That shared institutional history supports their continuing identification as companions. It does not establish an unchanging display arrangement, nor should an older loan photograph be treated as proof of their present location within a particular gallery. ^[1]

The Chasm of the Colorado remains compelling because its ambition is visible in its difficulties. Moran asks a single surface to hold breadth, depth, rock structure, rainfall and light. The eye can find exquisite individual passages without immediately resolving the whole. The picture’s early admirers and critics encountered that same challenge, leaving a history of disagreement that sharpens, rather than diminishes, the experience of looking.

Frequently Asked Questions

References

1. U.S. Department of the Interior Museum, Thomas Moran and the Big Picture, current collection identities for the two monumental canvases.
2. Nancy K. Anderson and contributors, Thomas Moran, National Gallery of Art, 1997; targeted Colorado narrative, entry and transcribed correspondence and reviews. Contemporary newspapers cited here were read through those transcriptions.
3. Kevin J. Avery, Thomas Moran’s Colburn’s Butte, South Utah: Forgotten Landmark of a Lost Friendship, Metropolitan Museum Journal 44, 2009; targeted discussion of the 1873 journey and related images.
4. G. W. Sheldon, American Painters, D. Appleton and Company, 1879, Moran chapter, especially printed p. 125.
5. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Grand Canyon of the Colorado River, separate work dated 1892 and 1908.
6. Splash image source.

   The Chasm of the Colorado, 1873–1874. U.S. Department of the Interior Museum; faithful reproduction via Smithsonian American Art Museum / Wikimedia Commons. Image source. Public Domain Mark; faithful two-dimensional reproduction. Resized only; complete source image retained.

7. Splash image source.

   The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, 1872. Wuselig / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0; U.S. Department of the Interior Museum painting. Image source. CC BY-SA 4.0; also marked PD-Art. Outer museum frame cropped; resized. Painted composition retained; photographic perspective unchanged. This image derivative is available under the same licence.

8. Splash image source.

   The Chasm of the Colorado, 1873–1874. U.S. Department of the Interior Museum; faithful reproduction via Smithsonian American Art Museum / Wikimedia Commons. Image source. Public Domain Mark; faithful two-dimensional reproduction. Resized only; complete source image retained.

9. Splash image source.

   Mountain of the Holy Cross, 1875. Autry Museum of the American West; faithful reproduction via Wikimedia Commons. Image source. Public Domain Mark; faithful two-dimensional reproduction. Resized only; complete source image retained.

10. Splash image source.

    Shoshone Falls on the Snake River, 1900. Wolfgang Sauber / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0; Gilcrease Museum painting. Image source. CC BY-SA 3.0; also marked PD-Art. Resized only; complete source image retained. This image derivative is available under the same licence.

11. Splash image source.

    Green River Cliffs, Wyoming, 1881. National Gallery of Art, Gift of the Milligan and Thomson Families. Image source. Public domain; NGA Open Access. Resized only; complete source image retained.

12. Splash image source.

    A View of Venice, 1891. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1968.120.1. Image source. Free to use; Smithsonian Open Access. Resized only; complete source image retained.

13. Splash image source.

    The Three Tetons, 1895. The White House Collection, Gift of C. R. Smith; faithful reproduction via Wikimedia Commons. Image source. Public Domain Mark; faithful reproduction of a two-dimensional public-domain work. Resized only; complete source image retained.