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In 1873, following up on his earlier success, Moran joined John Wesley Powell's expedition down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. Shortly after his return he set to work on a second canvas equal in size to his earlier Yellowstone painting. In 1874 Congress purchased Chasm of the Colorado (1873-1874, National Museum of American Art), which became the second of Moran's western landscapes to hang in the Capitol.
That same year Moran traveled to Denver and then north to see the Mountain of the Holy Cross--a massive mountain with a cross of snow on its side. The resulting painting became Moran's chief contribution to the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876. Iconic in its union of wilderness and religion, the Mountain of the Holy Cross became one of Moran's best known works.
His reputation established, Moran continued to travel widely during the following decades. He returned to Europe several times again following trails blazed by Turner. In 1883 he journeyed to Mexico. In later years he returned to the Grand Canyon and traveled more extensively in Arizona and New Mexico, producing a number of striking works of the pueblos at Acoma and Laguna. Extraordinarily productive, both as a painter and an etcher, Moran continued to work well into his eighth decade. At his death in Santa Barbara, California, in August 1926, he was memorialized as the "Dean of American Landscape Painters." |