THOMAS MORAN’S WEST: CHROMOLITHOGRAPHY, HIGH ART, AND POPULAR TASTE

By: Joni L. Kinsey (University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 2006. Illustrations, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. 271 pages. $45.00 cloth.)

Late in 1876, the year of Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition and also the Battle of the Little Bighorn, L. Prang and Company of Boston published a deluxe portfolio of fifteen chromolithographs of Thomas Moran’s watercolors of the Yellowstone region. Entitled The Yellowstone National Park, and the Mountain Regions of Portions of Idaho, Nevada and Utah, it included an essay by Ferdinand Hayden, the explorer, scientist, and lobbyist for national park status for Yellowstone. The publisher hoped to interest a wide audience of art lovers, scientists, fine book collectors, and all those who had a general curiosity about the American West. Joni L. Kinsey, associate professor of art history at the University of Iowa, presents a fascinating discussion of the genesis, execution, publication, distribution, reception, and fate of the portfolio in the context of nineteenth-century American values and economic conditions.1
      Indeed, this account is awash in context. The author works hard to keep in focus the core subject — fifteen color lithographic facsimiles of Moran’s watercolors and nine additional Moran watercolors intended for the project but not published — while also discussing the topography of the Yellowstone area, the state of its exploration in the 1870s, the initial interest in and eventual disdain for chromolithography among art critics, the reputation and ambitions of Louis Prang (who sought high art status for chromos, as the color lithographs were called), the gender of those who bought original art and those who purchased reproductions (women were prone to buy chromos for home decoration, a fact that contributed to even high quality examples being scorned in elite art circles, according to Kinsey), and the career of Thomas Moran, a major landscape painter and illustrator of the American West.2
      Kinsey’s challenge is to explore ever-widening circles of meaning and implication as the basis for understanding the significance of Prang’s publication. Her project is to re-position an artifact of the sort deemed marginal in traditional art historical study so as to make it central to her discourse. This upending of the canonical hierarchy — in which oil paintings are paramount, watercolors secondary, and chromos definitely tertiary — is a strategy much used by art historians in the twenty-first century and is one that opens intriguing avenues of discussion, as Kinsey demonstrates.3
      Still, the author asks a lot of readers to help keep things straight. In good art historical fashion, Kinsey compares and contrasts her primary subject (the set of chromolithographs) to all manner of related works by Moran, most importantly the set of watercolors of which the chromos are copies. The watercolors in turn were based on field sketches by the artist as well as photographs by Moran’s friend William Henry Jackson, and Kinsey brings these source materials into play as she assesses Moran’s literal accuracy and Romantic re-visioning. Further, Moran executed versions of these same views in other media (wood engraving, etching) for illustrations in publications such as Scribner’s, and Kinsey frequently illustrates those variants, especially when they may relate to the nine watercolors not included in the portfolio and now, except for one, unlocated. With so many examples under discussion, it would help to illustrate the appendix, “Moran’s Paintings for Louis Prang,” with a summary of all the images in the folio together with the likely parallels to the ones intended for the folio but not included. Seeing all the imagery in one place, by way of review, would make a sentence like this one easier to assess: “Had Devil’s Den appeared in the Prang publication, it … would have offer[ed] an interesting contrast to the sacred themes of The Mountain of the Holy Cross, the biblical allusions at Zion, and the rainbow in Yellowstone Lake” (p. 178).4
      The Yellowstone National Park set a new standard for chromolithographic reproduction, doing so at a time when chromos were being debased by the critics, who came to see them as garish, tasteless copies. Kinsey posits that this attitude was an aspect of the inchoate agenda to marginalize multiples in favor of unique originals — a bias that, she argues somewhat tenuously, led to modernism’s privileging of purely original art by primarily male artists. Although Prang had hoped that the portfolio would demonstrate once and for all the beauty and artistic value of chromolithographs, the publication did not receive much critical applause in its own day, though it is now highly regarded. As illustrated in Kinsey’s book, the chromos are indeed very beautiful in a clear, luminous, icy, magically colored way. Despite their documentary nature and intent, they are dream-like, almost surreal images for Americans who were imagining terrain that seemed home to both God (in the shafts of sunlight drenching the soaring peaks) and the devil (in the sulphurous caldrons bubbling with scalding liquids). There can be no doubt that, for those who saw it, the portfolio helped color in literal and imaginative ways popular perceptions of the mysterious American West.5
      This is an illuminating, well-written text in need of just a little more editing; for instance, the word “however” is used so often as to be a distraction and in a good many cases could be deleted to good effect.6
Roger HullWillamette University, Salem, Oregon

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