Yellowstone in art a challenge to artists
By Anne Millbrooke
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Evening on the Firehole by Brent Cotton, 24" x 48", oil on canvas
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Yellowstone is hot. Not just the pools, springs, and geysers, but also art depicting Yellowstone.
Exhibits of Yellowstone art appeared in museums around Montana this past summer. Several of the exhibits focused on historical artwork, but one was based on a challenge to current artists to exceed the grand art of old.
The artistic legacy of Yellowstone National Park includes the famous painter Thomas Moran and photographer William Henry Jackson, both of whom provided visual documentation of the region explored by Ferdinand V. Hayden’s federal expedition in 1871. Hayden surveyed the geology and mapped the region. Throughout the 19th century scientists relied upon artists to make a visual record, and Hayden hired Jackson to make a photographic record. Moran traveled with the expedition.
Yellowstone Engraved
As the expedition photographer, Jackson (1843-1942) took “wet-plate” photographs that required development on the spot. His equipment included multiple cameras, glass plates, tripods, lenses, chemicals, and a tent that served as his darkroom. The large plates enabled him to capture not only details needed by Hayden and other geologists on the expedition, but also details of aesthetic value. Variable lighting meant exposure times of 5 seconds to 20 minutes. Jackson used a double camera to made stereoscopic views of Yellowstone, and he created dioramas.
Moran (1837-1926) actually engraved Yellowstone pictures for Scribner’s Magazine before he went there, basing the engravings on rough sketches made during an 1870 expedition. That is what inspired him to join the Hayden expedition, which he did in Virginia City, Montana, early in the summer of 1871. As the expedition surveyed Yellowstone, he recorded the hot springs, geological formations, fossil forests, and landscape in sketches and watercolors. He later used these and Jackson’s photographs to create studio paintings of Yellowstone, some in oil and some in watercolor. Congress purchased his “Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone,” a 6 x 12 foot oil painting, for $10,000.
The art of Moran and Jackson did what mere words could not: show the grandeur and beauty of Wonderland. The images helped convince Congress and President Ulysses S. Grant to designate Yellowstone as the nation’s first national park in 1872. The images were also used to lobby for funding for the park and for expeditions to the West. Also, the pictures helped shape public opinion in favor of preserving and conserving natural wonders.
The show, “Yellowstone Engraved: Images That Popularized Jackson, Moran, and America’s First National Park” at the Montana Museum of Art and Culture in Missoula, featured engravings derived from Jackson’s photographs, Moran’s drawings and paintings, and later artists’ work. The engravings are from the 1871-1902 period.
“Let Wonderland Tell Its Story: The 1871 Alberttypes of William Henry Jackson” at the Montana Historical Society in Helena remains on display through October 27th. Alberttype is the name of an engraving process, invented in 1868 that enabled high-quality prints to be made of photographic images for the first time. Joseph Albert’s process allowed intermediate gray tones, much like a photograph. Edward Bierstadt held the American rights to the process and made these engravings for Hayden’s use in documenting his expedition and promoting Yellowstone and exploration. This traveling exhibit of 61 alberttypes was on display in the Old Courthouse at the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis last winter.
Yellowstone Then and Now
“Yellowstone Then and Now” at the Livingston Depot displayed historical images—engravings, stereopticons, postcards—and contemporary black-and-white photographs of the same sites, often taken from the same locations as the historical images. The exhibit focused on our changing perceptions of the nature and the history of Yellowstone National Park. Appropriately, the exhibit was displayed in a train depot, built in 1902, that served tourists going to and from the park.
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Hayden Valley Crossing by Larry Zabel, 24" x 72", oil on canvas
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“The experiment, beginning in 1872, almost failed,” explains exhibit curator Lee Silliman. “Had not the U.S. Army been summoned in 1886 to administer the park and protect its resources from despoilers of all stripes, the story of Yellowstone and the national park ideal would have unfolded far differently. Old practices of unbridled consumption of resources eventually gave way to more enlightened and scientific management of the park, especially after the establishment of the National Park Service in 1916.”
Silliman, a photographer living in Deer Lodge and curator of the “Yellowstone Then and Now” show, took the modern photographs using an 8” x 10” view camera, glass plates, and techniques of a past era. He made the frames and mounted the exhibit. Silliman also curated the “Yellowstone Engraved” and “Let Wonderland Tell Its Story” exhibits. All three exhibits are traveling exhibits that may appear at other venues in Montana. Watch for the exhibits appearing in your area.
The 87 images in the “Then and Now” exhibit at the Livingston Depot included hand-tinted engravings and early chromolithographs, engravings made using several stones, each to apply a different color. Engravings of Moran’s paintings and Jackson’s photographs of 1871 were represented. It was the publication of the engravings that made the two artists famous.
Jackson returned to Yellowstone with Hayden in 1872 and 1878 and with Moran in 1892. His photographs of the Yellowstone, initially through engravings derived therefrom, became famous. W. Stephen Thomas wrote a poem about Jackson that includes the line: “You wrought an image for us, Image which shrines the West.”
Moran returned to Yellowstone in 1892 and 1900. Of the 1892 visit to Yellowstone, Moran said, “I have been made much of at all the places in the park as the great and only ‘Moran,’ the painter of the Yellowstone.” In Yellowstone, in the American West, Moran found the subject material that he would paint throughout his career. “I place no value upon literal transcripts from Nature,” Moran explained. “My general scope is not realistic; all my tendencies are toward idealization.” The Kansas City Star described him thus: “Thomas Moran is confessedly America’s greatest landscape painter, as he is also the painter of America’s greatest landscapes.”The exhibit included works of other artists. Frank Jay Haynes opened a photo studio at Mammoth in 1884, and various Haynes photo shops produced Yellowstone pictures until 1967. He began producing picture postcards in 1900, and in 1916, he passed the business to his son, Jack Elias Haynes. Several Haynes postcards were displayed in “Then and Now.”
The Challenge
“It’s hard to find a major Yellowstone art work produced in the past fifty years,” according to Steve Zabel of the Montana Trails Gallery. So he issued a challenge to artists. Paint a major Yellowstone picture. The results of his challenge became “The Paintings of Yellowstone” show at the Bozeman gallery for a month beginning August 10.
Yellowstone has been called “the nation’s art gallery,” and many famous artists have visited Yellowstone since Moran and Jackson set the standard. John Henry Twachtman (1853-1902), for example, visited Yellowstone in September 1895 and painted 14 pictures, including views of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, the Lower Falls of the river, and the thermal pools. Yellowstone’s scenery was “fine enough to shock my mind,” he wrote. Painters James Everett Stuart, Frederic Remington, Carl Rungius, the photographer Ansel Adams, and others recorded Yellowstone in their art.
But, as Montana Trails owner Zabel observed, the masterpieces of old overshadow more recent art. A 2002 exhibit at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage in Los Angeles confirms this. “Drawn to Yellowstone: Artists in America’s First National Park” noted that the natural outdoor studio of Yellowstone failed to attract artists after World War II. A notable exception has been Michael Coleman, whose paintings of “Yellowstone Park” (1987) and “Geyser Basin Yellowstone” (1998) made the exhibit in Los Angeles.
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Montana Grazing by Susan Blackwood, 40" x 50", oil on canvas
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Coleman created a major painting for the Montana Trails Gallery’s show. Based in Provo, Utah, Coleman won the first national Arts for the Parks competition in 1987. Bears walk near a geyser in his award-winning painting of “Passing Showers” in Yellowstone. In addition to painting landscapes and animals, he is an award-winning sculptor.
Others invited to paint new works for the exhibit include Todd Connor, Susan Blackwood, Nicholas Coleman, Luke Frazier, Larry Zabel, Clyde Aspevig, Jan Perkins, Greg Scheibel, Joe Wayne, Russell Case, Jim Dick, John DeMott, Howard Friedland, and Bill Sawczuk.
The new art was displayed beside historical masterpieces: Thomas Moran’s “Tower Falls” and Albert Bierstadt’s “Old Faithful” (c. 1881). Bierstadt (1830-1902) had been a pioneer of panoramic paintings of western landscapes, a competitor of Moran, and he visited Yellowstone in 1881. Bierstadt’s 14 x 20 inch oil painting of “Old Faithful” sold on opening day for $1.7 million!
The question is, did the masterpieces of old, creations of artists, such as Moran and Bierstadt, intimidate the artists of today, or has a new masterpiece yet to join the distinguished history of Yellowstone art?
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