1892
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Smelting Works at Denver is a 1892 by Thomas Moran, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a factory glowing at dusk, its smokestacks puffing into a sky streaked with pink and gold. The Rocky Mountains rise behind it, sharp and quiet. Moran painted this in 1892, when Denver was booming. Factories meant jobs and money, but some already worried about the smoke. Moran liked what he saw—he called the city “lively” in a letter home. Look up other paintings of *america* to see how artists showed the same land in different moods.
For today's viewers of Thomas Moran’s watercolor, the sight of factory smoke pouring into pristine mountain air might prophesy environmental ruin. Yet within the context of America’s western expansion, the imagery of factories was more ambiguous. Some in Moran's time regarded the factories as a force of destruction, while others interpreted them as symbols of progress. Moran himself viewed Denver’s budding industry with enthusiasm, writing positively to his wife about the city’s growth since he first visited while part of a government survey in 1873. Two decades later, when Moran returned to…
Moran sketched this image while waiting for his travel arrangements to be resolved, having learned that he received a commission for a large painting of Wyoming for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Thomas Moran (February 12, 1837 – August 25, 1926) was an American painter and printmaker of the Hudson River School in New York whose work often featured the Rocky Mountains.
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