Image of the Day, April 29, 2012

By Donna Poutlon

“I decided very early that I would be an American painter. I travelled the county over, and the West appealed to me. There is no phase of landscape in which we are not richer, more varied and interesting… ” – Thomas Moran

Thomas Moran, watercolor. Credit: Painters of Utah's Canyons and Deserts.Traveling with John Wesley Powell during the summer of 1873, Thomas Moran painted Colburn’s Butte. Powell often named lakes and mountains after people on his expeditions. He named the peak after J.E. Colburn a writer for the New York Times who was travelling with the survey expedition to record his impressions of the southwest for a chapter in William Cullen Bryan’s Picturesque American.

Photograph of a Paiute Youth, Thomas Moran, and J.E. Colburn, 1873. Credit: Painters of Utah's Canyons and Deserts.

Image of the Day, December 8, 2011

By Donna Poulton

"I have in many places departed form the severe ascetic style ... Under ordinary circumstances, the ascetic discipline is necessary. Give the imagination an inch, and it is apt to take an ell, and the fundamental requirement of scientific method - accuracy of statement - is imperiled. But in the Grand Canyon district there is no such danger. The stimulants which are demoralizing elsewhere are necessary here to exalt the mind sufficiently to comprehend the sublimity of the subjects. Their sublimity has in fact been hitherto underrated." - Clarence Dutton

William Henry Holmes was employed by Clarence Dutton as a cartographer and sketch artist for his U. S. Geological Survey of the Grand Canyon District. This is a chromolithograph based on a sketch made by Holmes during his visits to the Grand Canyon District, which included Zion National Park.

Credit: Utah’s Canyons and Deserts

William Henry Holmes, Smithsonian Butte—Valley of the Virgen [sic], chromolitograph based on a sketch for Clarence Edward Dutton’s The Tertiary History of the Grand Canyon District, delivered to Congress in 1881.