Window on the West: One-patining exhibit, Thomas Moran's 'Shoshone Falls,' opens at Portland Art Museum

Thomas Moran was an eyewitness to one of the great American stories -- the nation's transformation from a raw, rural and eastward-leaning frontier culture into a teeming and largely urban society that sprawled from sea to shining sea.

In a small but significant way, he participated in the tale. His grand paintings of the wild and primitive West -- including "Shoshone Falls on the Snake River," which he painted in 1900 -- were romantic evocations of the untamed landscape. They were also open invitations to join the westward rush of Manifest Destiny to the promised land.

On Saturday, the Portland Art Museum opens a one-painting exhibition of the 12-foot-wide "Shoshone Falls on the Snake River," borrowed from the

in Tulsa, Okla., a treasure trove of Moran paintings. The exhibit is supported by a handful of good Moran watercolors, also borrowed from the Gilcrease, and a wonderful, 6-foot-wide panoramic photograph of the falls taken in the 1880s. But like last year's exhibition of Raphael's sumptuous 1516 portrait "La Velata," it's essentially a solo show.

Brian Ferriso, the Portland museum's executive director, quotes the late James Wood, former director of the

and president of the J. Paul Getty Trust, on small-scale exhibits: "It all depends on the quality. If you get the quality, that'll trump the quantity."


Whatever you think of single-painting shows, Moran's got the quality.

He was born in England in 1837 but migrated to Pennsylvania in 1844 with his parents, handweavers who couldn't find much work in their native country, so he was very much an American painter. He lived a good long time, until 1926, and in those years he saw a lot, including an art scene that spun in sometimes dizzying degrees from the idealized lakes and woods of the Hudson River School to the tough urban realism of the Ashcan School.

with which Moran quickly and easily aligned himself after beginning his artistic career as an engraver, was one of the first major movements in American art. Some of its painters were academically trained and some, like Moran, were largely self-taught. But the movement asserted a European-style professionalism after the era of the traveling folk painters and portraitists of the colonial and early statehood years. Begun in about 1825 by another English native, Thomas Cole, the Hudson River movement continued in waves until about the turn of the 20th century. It would include such outstanding figures as Frederic Edwin Church, Asher Durand, Jasper Francis Cropsey, Albert Bierstadt and Sanford Robinson Gifford.

Influenced in technique by English pastoralists and romanticists such as the great J.M.W. Turner, and by other European artists such as the Dutch landscape painters and the 17th-century French artist Claude Lorrain, the Hudson River painters were resolutely American in their approach to Romanticism. Like the popular American transcendentalist writers -- Emerson, Thoreau -- they held a firm view of humans' place within nature, and they celebrated the natural, seeking a kind of Edenic, evanescent light in their landscape scenes.

People often think of the Hudson River painters as portrayers of wilderness, but in fact the landscapes are often far more pastoral, views of places in which humans have already made their mark, if gently. The painters worked up the Hudson Valley and on into the Catskill and Adirondack mountains of Upstate New York and the White Mountains of nearby New Hampshire. A favorite location was Lake George in the Adirondacks, already a rural getaway for New York urbanites. It would retain its fascination for artists even after the Hudson River movement faded: Some of Georgia O'Keeffe's most striking images from before she discovered New Mexico are of Lake George.

For some Hudson River artists -- most prominently, Bierstadt and Moran -- the lure of the West was strong, and their paintings, if not their basic romantic approach, changed with the landscape. Bierstadt's 1869 painting "Mount Hood," an idealized vision of the Oregon peak, is an iconic piece in the Portland Art Museum's permanent collections. Moran's paintings of the Yellowstone region, which he made after an 1871 expedition, became prominent pieces in the campaign to create a system of national parks.

Robert Hughes, in his book

told how Moran's forays into the West came about:

"The turning point in Moran's career came in 1871, when Dr. Ferdinand Hayden, director of the United States Geological Survey, invited him to join an expedition into the Yellowstone area of Wyoming. At that time Yellowstone was terra incognita to the white man. It was known, for its hot mud cakes, geysers and constant geothermal activity, as 'the place where hell bubbled up,' but apart from a few mountain men and trappers, the only white man to describe it had been John Coulter, a member of Lewis and Clark's expedition, who strayed into it in 1807. The expedition was backed by the U.S. government, and Moran' s role was funded partly by the directors of the Northern Pacific Railroad -- who reasoned, shrewdly, that the circulation of Moran's images of Yellowstone, and the publicity they got, might help create a new tourist destination and thus a profitable new railroad line."

At their height the best Hudson River painters were almost like rock stars. Huge panoramic nature paintings became major attractions in the cities, being unveiled in single-work shows not unlike the Portland museum's current exhibit, but with more of a P.T. Barnum push. Church was a master at this lucrative game. Moran's magnificent 8-by-14-foot panorama "The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone," from the 1871 expedition, drew rapturous crowds the following year, and in addition to its rugged grandeur it contained a touch beloved of the Hudson River painters: two small human figures, dwarfed by the nature they are taking in but also fitting in as part of it.

Time moved on, and eventually the silent flickers and other mass entertainments grabbed the public's attention. As superb as it is, Moran's "Shoshone Falls on the Snake River" is also something of a last hurrah. Interest in the form was waning, and art historians refer to "Shoshone Falls" as the last of Moran's great panoramas.

Last, but far from least. This grand-scale painting of the 900-foot-wide falls at their most wild is like a bridge from the idealistic past of the Hudson River tradition to the blunted and managed future that was soon to follow. Today, the water flow at Shoshone Falls, just outside of Twin Falls, Idaho, is managed by Idaho Power, and when the vast farms nearby need irrigating, the flow over the precipice -- at 212 feet, it's 36 feet taller than Niagara -- shuts down to something over a trickle. It's gone from something that powerfully is, to something that is pragmatically used.

The situation is familiar across the water-starved and power-hungry West, not unlike the troubles in the Klamath Basin or the inundation of Celilo Falls on the Columbia River to keep lights in Portland shining and grain barges from the Inland Empire chugging out to sea. In celebrating the falls' magnificent savagery, Moran also helped hasten their taming and diminishment. Woody Guthrie would do the same a few decades later with his songs in celebration of the Columbia River, which helped prepare the way for the river's system of dams. So life goes, and not even artists escape the net.

Still, what a painting. You should see for yourself.