The Teton Range

The Teton Range by Thomas Moran is an oil on canvas landscape from 1897, dimensions 76.2 x 114.3 cm. This piece is typical of Thomas Moran, who spent a lot of time focussing on Colorado and Yellowstone mountain and rockscapes.

This painting is of the Teton Range of Mountains in Colorado with snow on them. The foreground of the painting is boulders, with a rapid stream rushing down towards the viewer. The boulders are large and grey, and they rise up into dark greenery, trees and plants, mountain pasture and evergreen trees. The stream rushing down from the left foreground towards the viewer is at a confluence with a larger slow moving river that merges to flow down to the bottom of the painting. The river looks glacial in nature, deep, cold, slow and grey, cutting deeply into the rocks as it flows down, in contrast to the shallow rushing stream.

The centre of the picture is light green, sweeping pasture, with a rocky crag to the right, some boulders breaking up the sweep, and a few evergreens with the river in its gorge flowing through. The pasture runs up to the rocky lower slopes of the mountain range. Up ahead, the feature of the painting is displayed beautifully, the snowy range of mountains lit by light of a hidden sun.

The mountains run the width of the picture from left to right, steepest on the left. To the left the mountains start with almost a sheer rise, with sky and cloud in the gap right at the edge of the picture. There is a large area of bare rock to the left to centre before the snow covers most of the rest of the range.

The steep mountains cover the left to centre and then there is a very obvious glacial slope in the middle, although the slope is covered in snow rathee than showing glacial ice. The smooth and beautiful glacial slope gives way to lower mountains to the right, lower than the left and completely covered in snow apart from rocky tips poking out.

The picture concludes with a dark blue-grey sky with some small white clouds, and a pale ghost of a daytime moon behind the right hand mountains. This is a lovely natural scene with no human interference and no sign of any life at all, very pleasing on the eye.