Thomas Moran (1837-1926), Great Hot Springs Yellowstone Park,

1893. Oil on canvas, 19½ x 29½ in. Gift of the Thomas Gilcrease
Foundation, 1955. 0126.2342.

BEYOND
NATURE
Thomas Moran’s landscapes have a
powerful hold within the collection at the
Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma
By James D. Balestrieri
 T
homas Moran and Thomas
Cole spent their early years in
the same small city in England:
Bolton. Their parents worked
in the weaving trade—Moran’s family
specialized in textile designs; the Coles
were known as fine weavers. Bolton
was a hive of cottage industries. But the
invention of textile mills transformed
the city in a few short years. As
children, Moran and Cole would have
seen the undying fires of the mills
and breathed in the fug of billowing
smoke. They witnessed their parents’
craft—their art and livelihoods—made
superfluous. Their parents took jobs
in the mills that required them to
work long hours for little money in
oppressive conditions. The mills might
have controlled Bolton, but poverty
Thomas Moran, Book of Lists, page 31.
Gilcrease Museum Archives, Tulsa, Oklahoma. GM 4026.4048.
44
reigned. In response Ned Ludd and
his Luddites rose in armed, bloody
rebellion. It was enough to make any
impressionable child become an adult
who lights out for the wilderness.
Author Ray Bradbury wrote, “You
must stay drunk on writing so reality
cannot destroy you.” Substitute painting
for writing, and you have some idea
of what I am thinking, not only about
Moran and Cole’s responses to the
dehumanizing effects of industrial
Britain, but about the birth of modern
horror, fantasy and science fiction
(hence the Bradbury quote) that runs
alongside the romantic, transcendental
turn to nature in philosophy and the
arts. In fact, I would argue that the
weird, as exemplified by, say, Poe and
Hawthorne, and the deism of, say,
Ruskin and Thoreau, are two sides of
the same coin, two opposite aesthetic
responses to the same cataclysmic
shift in scale from human-centered to
machine-centered.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
epitomizes the fear of tampering with
Nature and the tragic hubris that
inevitably ensues. Darker even than
this, perhaps, is the new interest in
the weird, the kind of cosmic horror
that H. P. Lovecraft would codify in
his 1927 essay, “Supernatural Horror
in Literature.” Works of art that fall
into the embrace of cosmic horror
describe the revolt of Nature against
our puny human notions of dominance,
improvement and progress. These can
take many forms, Herman Melville’s
novel Moby-Dick, or the entire subgenre
Thomas Gilcrease. Photograph.
Gilcrease Museum Archives,
Tulsa, Oklahoma. GM 4327.9154.
Thomas Moran (1837-1926), Lower Falls, Yellowstone Park, 1893. Oil on canvas, 395/8 x 59¼ in. Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma. GM 01.2344.
of shipwreck paintings such as Thomas
Moran’s 1890 masterwork at the
Gilcrease, Spectres from the North.
More even than his great paintings
of Green River and the Grand Canyon,
when you stand at a certain distance
Spectres from the North, seems to curve
around you like a section of one of the
tremendous circular panorama paintings
that preceded motion pictures. But the
composition of the painting put me
immediately in mind of Poe, particularly
his sole effort in the novel The Narrative
of Arthur Gordon Pym. In the novel, Pym,
a stowaway, is shipwrecked and rescued
several times, moving ever southward
toward the Antarctic. At the end, having
traversed a region of ice, Pym sees, or
seems to, the edge of the world as the
oceans fall into a hole that suggests
the “hollow earth” theory—long
discredited now, apart from YouTube
cranks, but one that had some currency
then. There is a suggestion of walls—a
rampart—rising in distance, a wonder
that may be a mirage or a glimpse of
the afterlife. Pym writes: “March 9. The
white ashy material fell now continually
around us, and in vast quantities. The
range of vapour to the southward had
arisen prodigiously in the horizon, and
began to assume more distinctness of
form. I can liken it to nothing but a
limitless cataract, rolling silently into the
sea from some immense and far-distant
rampart in the heaven. The gigantic
curtain ranged along the whole extent
of the southern horizon. It emitted no
sound.” And there it is in Spectres from
the North, all of it, the white city of ice
in the distance, touched by a rainbow,
the last vision of the sailors whose limbs
flail in the sea beside a fragment of a
ship that looks like a four-poster bed.
Above, a living albatross—a symbol of
good fortune to mariners—hovers.You
can hear the native in Pym’s narrative
crying “Tekeli-li!” breaking the
silence—Lovecraft would pay homage
to this in his Antarctic fiction At the
Mountains of Madness, where an ill-fated
expedition discovers the ruins of an
extraterrestrial civilization older than
man under the towering peaks of ice.
It’s hard to imagine Moran not
having read Poe. He loved Byron and
Hawthorne and gravitated toward the
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 Thomas Moran (1837-1926), Shoshone Falls on the Snake River, 1900. Oil on canvas, 71 x 144 in.
Gift of the Thomas Gilcrease Foundation, 1955. 0126.2339.

supernatural in fiction and poetry. He
regularly painted and engraved haunted
houses and ruined castles.You would
think, then, that most of his work
arose as products of his imagination.
You, like me, would be wrong. He also
followed, with keen interest, the 19th
century’s great era of exploration and
accompanied a number of expeditions
to the American West.
In short. Thomas Moran traveled.
And traveled. And traveled.
I traveled recently, to Tulsa, where
I saw and had a chance to tour the
Gilcrease Museum with curator Laura
Fry. This is where I stood in front of
Spectres from the North and had the
uncanny, sublime sensation of being
surrounded by the scene, drowned, as
it were, in the icy waves. I also visited
the archives, where head archivist and
librarian Renee Harvey showed me
some of the Gilcrease’s many treasures.
Moran’s daybook, his painter’s diary

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is there, and she had opened it to
a page dating from one of Moran’s
trips by steamship across the Atlantic.
In the entry, he describes seeing
icebergs and references the painting
that would become Spectres from the
North. Moran’s apparent devotion to
surfaces, to recording the world he
sees, as he sees it, masks—at least at
times—another interest, an interest in
reading (and creating) hidden messages,
codes beneath surfaces, the patterns in
nature—and in supernature. Realism,
for Moran, isn’t an end in itself, it isn’t
a genre after all, it’s a tool, a strategy,
another way in, another way for art to
cope with, to respond and to counter
the dark realities born out of the
increasingly industrialized, mechanized,
dehumanized and denatured Western
World. But Nature—large and small
N—resists the artist’s eye, hand, skill.
You see it in Moran’s working sketches,
in a sketch like Green River, September
20, 1881. The work is haunted—as all
art is haunted—by the artist’s inability
to capture and transmit what he sees.
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 Thomas Moran (1837-1926), Bridge Over the Schuylkill, Philadelphia, 1856. Watercolor on paper, 6½ x 11/ in.
Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma. GM 0226.798.
Read his corrections, instructions,
omissions. John Ruskin, the fons et
origo of the turn back to nature in art
knew that art would fall short of nature,
by definition, by virtue of the simple
yet profound gaps between the artist’s
perception, intention and creation.
Into these gaps imagination, vision,
dream and nightmare creep and flood.
Thomas Moran (1837-1926), Espanola, New Mexico, late 19th-century. Watercolor and pencil on
paper, 5¾ x 8/ in. Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma. GM 0236.848.
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Unless. Unless the notes on the sketch
don’t describe Moran’s failings but his
desires. Make the “rain orange.” Make
the “shadow” on the butte “green at
bottom.” And so on. Maybe imagination
was there all along, a priori.
Moran’s sketched incessantly. The
man’s hand must have been moving
even while he was asleep. The Gilcrease
alone has over 1,000 works by Moran
(and his wife, Mary, whose specialty was
printmaking). Consider Espanola, New
Mexico, a small, beautiful watercolor
sketch on railroad stationery, gives some
idea of the artist’s drive and passion
to create. But visions and dreams are
all over Moran’s paintings, even those
we see as realistic views of places in
the American West and elsewhere.
Deep time scales in the eroded rocks
of Green River tower like the ruined
battlements of forgotten empires
above the ghosts of Native Americans
Moran never saw. These ghosts are
then doubled and reflected in Alice in
Wonderland fashion in the mirror of
the river. It is as if Moran picked up
where Thomas Cole’s tremendous cycle,
The Course of Empire, left off—with
Desolation as nature reclaims empire—as
if Moran pulled the camera back to
embrace eons of instead of centuries.
Paintings of nature, or perhaps we
should amend that to say paintings that
find their inspiration in nature, serve
as reminders, emblems, perhaps, of the
enormous, greater-than-human forces
that are truly in charge.
Throughout the 19th century, running
Thomas Moran (1837-1926), Spectres from the North, 1890. Oil on canvas, 741⁄2 x 118¼ in. Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma. GM 0126.2340.
Rare books at the Gilcrease Museum in
Tulsa, Oklahoma.
alongside the rise of the machine, the
secret fabric of Nature revealed itself to
science. Old mysteries and relationships
between humankind and Nature
thinned out. Some snapped altogether.
Just as the industrial cities made men
feel insignificant, a theory such as
Darwin and Wallace’s evolution made
men feel irrelevant. As the heretofore
awesome forces of nature were reduced
to formulae, it became clear that they
were indifferent to man, that neither
nature, nor the larger universe, nor
God—whose very existence and
identity quavered uneasily—needed
us. Not only did it suddenly seem
that Nature—with its newly acquired
capital N—had no need of God.
Nature, in fact, might be God, and
thus have no need for homo sapiens.
The Earth we depend on doesn’t need
us at all and might even be better
off without us. Tough concepts to
grapple with. Then and now. Artists of
all stripes sought mystery elsewhere
or created mystery wherever and
whenever it couldn’t be found. Think
of Lewis Carroll, Ambrose Bierce and
hosts of others.
For Thomas Moran, the mystery
never ended. In his biography, Thomas
Moran, Artist of the Mountains, author
Thomas Wilkins writes about Moran’s
last moments: “The end came on
August 25, 1926, in Moran’s ninetieth
year. ‘He died looking at the cracks
in the ceiling,’ wrote his daughter,
‘making Venice out of their patterns,
just as, all his life, he had lingered at
marble panels and stained wood, seeing
pictures in the lines.’”
Pictures in lines and stains, faces in
clouds—patterns in nature. There’s a
name for this: paredolia. To an artist
it means finding meaning in what is,
apparently, random. To an artist, there’s
always a shadow scuttling away from
the light, and there’s always a mystery
hiding in it.
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