Landscapes Preserving the Landscape

By James D. Balestrieri

American author and historian Wallace Stegner once wrote that the national parks were “the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.” Ken Burns’s documentary, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, springs from Stegner’s observation; consequently, Stegner’s words have entered the pantheon of American aphorisms. In large measure, however, it might be said that artists—and art—lie at the very origins of the idea of the national parks. In the interim, art has become an essential aspect of the National Park Service (NPS), which has administered the parks since 1916.

As the NPS states, “Artist George Catlin first conceived of the national park idea in 1832. He envisioned large-scale natural preservation for public enjoyment as he traveled to the American interior to paint portraits of Native Americans. Concerned about the destructive effects of westward expansion, Catlin wanted “by some great protecting policy of government…a magnificent park…a nation’s park, containing man and beast, in all the wild(ness) and freshness of their nature’s beauty!’” Later, in the years just prior to and following the Civil War, photographer Carleton Watkins and celebrated American painters like Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran brought the romance and grandeur of the American West to viewers back on the East Coast through exquisite lithographs and illustrations. Periodicals of the era followed the various scientific and exploratory expeditions; an eager public ate them up. The landscape of the West emerged in art as a kind of visionary place, a sublime Eden, vast and powerful as well as beautiful.

One of these expeditions, a geological survey led by Ferdinand V. Hayden in 1871, presented Yellowstone to the American public. Photographer William Henry Jackson and Moran accompanied Hayden. Congress purchased GRAND CANYON OF THE YELLOWSTONE, one of the monumental works Moran painted on his return and this image, along with Jackson’s photos, helped Hayden secure support for the establishment of Yellowstone as America’s first national park in 1872. Other parks followed and, in 1906, under President Theodore Roosevelt, the passage of the Antiquities Act permitted chief executives to set aside “historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest.”

NPS didn’t forget the role of art, and “In 1917 Stephen T. Mather, the first director of the National Park Service, arranged an exhibit of American landscapes and parks by artists that included Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, Carl Rungius, John Henry Twachtman, and other noted artists at the National Museum (Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History).” During the Depression, as part of the Works Project Authority, the NPS commissioned artists to paint landscapes of the parks. NPS continues to collect artworks related to the parks; their extensive collections can be seen today at their headquarters in Washington, D.C., and in the individual parks themselves.

Although William Henry Jackson is best known as a photographer, he was, first and foremost, a watercolorist. The largest repository of his works resides as part of the NPS at Scotts Bluff National Monument, an important travelers’ landmark on the Platte River in Nebraska.

It is interesting to note that in later years he returned to painting, often rendering subjects he had photographed in watercolor. Jackson’s PARLEY’S CAÑON—LOWER PART, painted circa 1866, prior to the Hayden’s Yellowstone expedition, depicts the emigrants’ route to Salt Lake Valley. Not a large painting, and probably painted on site, what is most arresting is the sheer scale of the mountains that flank the all but invisible covered wagons snaking through the canyon. The sense here—one shared by the national parks—isn’t of a place untouched by humanity, but of a place that might be so vast as to be untouchable.

Moran’s YELLOWSTONE CANYON, painted in 1871 while he was part of the Hayden Geological Survey, functions as an early sketch for what would become GRAND CANYON OF THE YELLOWSTONE. Like Jackson’s study of Parley’s Canyon, Moran’s watercolor hints at the deep time of the canyon, of the eons of its formation, the vertigo of its heights, its drops and its cataracts. And the light on the rocks in the foreground, done in brilliant gouache, shadows flanking and a suggestion of the echoing canyon beyond, scales up in the monumental canvas. It’s Moran light defining Moran space.

Painted in 1924, William Howard (Will) Shuster’s DOME ROOM is “one of a series of eight large canvases that were the first paintings ever made of the Carlsbad Caverns National Park.” Shuster, a Santa Fe artist and one of the celebrated Los Cinco Pintores, had moved to the Southwest after contracting tuberculosis because of being gassed during World War I. Apart from his art, Shuster is known as the creator of Zozobra, or “Old Man Gloom,” a huge figure burned in effigy during Santa Fe’s Fiesta. We don’t think of interiors—like caves—as part of the landscape tradition of the American West, but Carlsbad Caverns, and others, are very much part of the region’s mystery and allure. In this painting, Shuster lights an area behind a hulking stalagmite to create a sense of depth and texture in this chamber of the cavern. From the roof of the illuminated mouth, small stalactites hang like fangs while the minerals from other stalagmites at left drip in layers. The overall effect is of a mysterious vault in a hidden cathedral.

One of a trio of paintings of the primordial mountain that rose, prior to the eruption that created Crater Lake some 7,700 years ago, Paul Clark Rockwood’s MOUNT MAZAMA UNDER MAXIMUM GLACIATION, painted circa 1939, shows the National Park Service’s interest in the use of art to imagine the geological past. Rockwood painted this scene to depict Mount Mazama as it might have looked during the ice age, then envisioned the mountain erupting, and, finally, depicted the crater and lake as they are today. Art here renders time visually, allowing the NPS to show change on a vast scale. It’s a crucial adjunct to science.

FRIJOLES CANYON—SECOND VIEW, 1935-36, by Helmut Naumer Sr. is an ode, of sorts, to the vertiginous detail found in Moran’s work, but in pastel rather than watercolor or oil. Frijoles Canyon is part of Bandelier National Monument and Naumer created some 14 pastels there as part of the WPA. Of pastels, Naumer said that they caught “the fleeting effects of the sky and water and our own New Mexico landscapes with fast changing colors sweeping rapidly across it, for there are hundreds of different colors and shades, so one loses no time in mixing colors as in oil.”

MEN AND BOYS HERDING TOWN HORSES, Pablita Velarde’s 1940 painting in casein, is one of “over 70 paintings [she produced] to help visitors understand the ancestral Pueblo sites at Bandelier National Monument.” An important early Pueblo painter, who also worked under the auspices of the WPA, Velarde reminds us that pure landscapes were not part of the Ancient Indigenous petroglyph tradition. The painters on the rock walls of the Americas focused on animals and human beings and their interactions, as well as images of the divine. Perhaps they saw the divinity of the land in the animals and people, the flora in the fauna, as it were.

Closer to the present, and as evidence of the ongoing interest in collecting at the NPS, (CANYONLANDS), Doug Johnson’s 1975 painting of Canyonlands National Park, has the feel of a commemorative postage stamp—and there have been many such stamps depicting scenes from the parks—especially in the text that frames the landscape on three sides.

A quote from critic Nancy Newhall, who worked with famed Western photographer Ansel Adams, the words sum up the many reasons why we set aside our national parks: “The wilderness holds answers to questions man has not yet learned how to ask.”

Our best idea? Maybe, though American democracy might give the national parks a run for their money. Admittedly, democracy is much harder for an artist to capture on canvas—or for a tourist to snap on a cellphone. But if national parks are our best idea, perhaps it’s precisely because we can see and appreciate them, apprehending their scientific and aesthetic value as well as the magical capacity of their landscapes to inspire awe in any and all of us and make us all remember to breathe.

This story appeared in the February/March 2025 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Subscribe today to read every issue in its entirety.

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