Oil Paintings Reproductions

About The Artist - Thomas Moran (February 12, 1837 - August 25, 1926)

Thomas Moran, an American artist, is one of America's greatest landscape painters.

About The Painting - An Arizona Sunset Near the Grand Canyon

Thomas Moran's landscape of the Yellow Stone region fired the imagination of the Congress and inspired it to establish the Yellowstone National Park in 1916.

Moran's landscapes in pencil and watercolor capture the grandeur and the ruggedness, beauty, and power of the terrain and the surrounding natural elements with much fluidity. Most of his paintings are of the various areas of the Yellowstone region. Moran worked with expedition photographer, William Henry Jackson and sketched several watercolors of Yellowstone's waterfalls, springs, mudpots, hot springs, and geysers. He then took these compositions back to his studio where he watercolored them.

An Arizona Sunset near the Grand Canyon is a water color that successfully captures and transports the viewer to the Grand Canyon back in 1898. A fiery orange and reddish sky, a golden amorphous sun, and dark shadow of landscape meeting the horizon contribute heavily to the appeal.

An imaginative and skilled painter, Moran's technical virtuosity, inspired by the great J.M.W. Turner, is remarkable, as his use of light and landscape elements to create a focal point and smaller focal points throughout the canvas. Romantic landscape, An Arizona Sunset near the Grand Canyon offers a range of hues, images, elements, and creates a mood that almost implores the viewer to stare in amazement at such a realistic illustration.

An Arizona Sunset near the Grand Canyon, oil on canvas, was painted by Moran based on sketches done during his 2nd trip to the Grand Canyon in Colorado in 1892. Moran successfully captured the flaming red-orange sky of the Grand Canyon and made it more dramatic by adding contrasting gray, dark clouds. This painting reflects the artist's colorist freedom. The sudden drop from the edge of the foreground in the painting to the flowing river as it paves its way through the rocky lush outcroppings created a sense of drama and fills the lower edge of the picture.

The use of sharp and clearly defined features helps establish a topographical reality as seen from different perspectives and create a visual treat.