Thomas Moran (1837–1926) was a British-born American landscape painter who became the defining visual chronicler of the American West, producing monumental canvases of Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, and the Rocky Mountains that shaped the national imagination of these places and directly influenced their designation as protected national parks. Accompanying the Hayden Geological Survey of Yellowstone in 1871, he made sketches and watercolors that he translated into a massive canvas, The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, which Congress purchased for $10,000 and hung in the Senate lobby. Influenced by J.M.W. Turner's dramatic handling of light and atmosphere, Moran gave the western landscape an epic, almost supernatural quality — all burning skies, bottomless chasms, and light that seems to come from within the rock rather than fall upon it. His work remains the most powerful visual argument ever made for the sublime character of the American landscape.