The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone

The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone is a monumental oil painting on canvas, now mounted on aluminum, by the English-born American painter Thomas Moran, completed in 1872; it belongs to the U.S. Department of the Interior Museum in Washington, D.C. It measures 84 × 144 1/4 inches, roughly seven by twelve feet.

In the summer of 1871 Moran joined part of Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden's government-sponsored geological survey of the western territories as its guest artist, and spent several days sketching the canyon of the Yellowstone River from different vantage points. Hayden's report, illustrated with Moran's sketches and William Henry Jackson's photographs, helped persuade Congress to protect the region, and on 1 March 1872 President Ulysses S. Grant signed the act creating Yellowstone, the first national park in the world. Moran worked the large canvas up from these sketches, and in his letters he called it his big picture.

The view is idealized rather than strictly topographical. A waterfall plunges into a V-shaped gorge whose walls of ochre, yellow and white rock fill most of the canvas, framed by dark pines and shadowed cliffs. On a rocky ledge in the foreground stand four small figures, among them a Native American, set against the scale of the landscape.

Congress bought the painting in 1872 for $10,000 and hung it in the U.S. Capitol, and the poet and editor Richard Watson Gilder called it the most remarkable work of art exhibited in the country for a long time. In 1950 Public Law 81-603, signed by President Truman, transferred it to the Department of the Interior. Lent to other museums from the late 1960s, it returned to the Interior Museum in 2020 for the long-term exhibition Thomas Moran and the Big Picture, beside his Chasm of the Colorado. Moran later treated the same view again in a second canvas of 1893–1901, now in the Smithsonian American Art Museum.