Thomas Moran Sale Sets a Record
 Thomas Moran’s “Green River of Wyoming,” from 1878 |
(6/11/2008) “Green River of Wyoming,” a large-scale Western landscape painted by Thomas Moran in 1878, set an all-time record for the price paid for a 19th-century American painting at Christie’s Auction House on May 21.
Rik Pike, a spokesman for the auction house, said that the specialists at Christie’s “knew it would do well, but the final price was exceptional.”
The work was “one of the earliest portrayals of Wyoming” by one of “the most celebrated landscape painters,” he said — “simply a magnificent painting” whose beauty could not begin to be conveyed in a reproduction.
The auction house had estimated that the 25-by-48-inch painting would sell in the $3.5 million-to-$5 million range. But the $17.7 million the painting commanded broke the previous record for a 19th-century American painting, held by a John Singer Sargent portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife that received a final bid of $8.8 million in 2004.
Phyllis Braff, who is compiling the catalogue raisonné of Moran’s paintings, said on Saturday that she was “very pleased that [the sale] will lead to a re-evaluation of his career and paintings.” While the value of American art of the period has been increasing in private sales, this is the first public auction in a while of a painting from this period of this caliber.
According to Ms. Braff, a traveling exhibit of the work of J.M.W. Turner, which will arrive at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in July, has brought not only renewed attention and acclaim to Turner but also to Moran, who was known as the “American Turner” during his lifetime.
Ms. Braff credited the market forces of supply and demand with being able to “produce that kind of competition” in the bidding. “There are very few Green River paintings of this scale,” she said. “It’s a very large scale for Moran and artists of that time.”
She said almost all of the similarly sized subjects were in museum collections now, including the Kimbell Art Museum and the Amon Carter Museum, both in Fort Worth, Tex., as well as the Bolton Art Museum in England. “Green River of Wyoming” was in the same family’s collection since 1920 and had been exhibited in an Oklahoma museum for the past 10 years on an extended loan.
“There won’t soon be another opportunity to buy such a work, and that bid the price up,” Ms. Braff said.
Initially, the interest during the auction appeared to be broad and varied, but it came down to two “very keen” bidders, one on the phone and one in the room, who drove the price up from its pre-sale estimate “in seconds” and then past the previous record just as quickly, Mr. Pike said.
The new record has given Western art of that period a commercial seal of approval unprecedented in the world of fine art collecting. The Christie’s sale of more than $41 million received the highest combined total for an auction of American Western art.
Mr. Pike said the value of American art has been on the rise, buoyed by the still-robust overall art market. The “Green River” purchase, by Avery Galleries of Bryn Mawr, Pa., has also brought new acclaim to Moran, whose Western subjects have an international appeal far beyond East Hampton, where he built his house in 1884.
Meanwhile, an effort to preserve the artist’s house and studio in East Hampton is under way. With vines and vegetation taking over the windowsills, it needs a great deal of restoration work.
According to Peter Wolf, who is president of the Thomas Moran Trust, the sale “underlines the prominence of Thomas Moran as a national figure.” The trust is helping raise money for and awareness about the artist’s house on Main Street here.
Mr. Wolf said that Moran had been forgotten by collectors and dealers for many years. The Christie’s sale reinforced how important his house and its studio are to East Hampton, he said, and to those around the country interested in his art and where and how he worked.
According to the Christie’s lot description, Moran traveled on the recently completed Union Pacific Railroad to Green River City in 1871 on his trip out west. Although he stayed only briefly in Green River before heading to Yellowstone to depict the area for Scribner’s magazine, he made a number of watercolor sketches that were more fully realized in his New York and later East Hampton studio.
“Before he saw this subject, he didn’t have an American landscape with real color,” Ms. Braff said. “The red rocks that dominated the landscape didn’t give him much to tie in with Turner and he didn’t really flourish as a Turneresque painter until this theme.”
Speaking of the painting that sold at Christie’s, she said, “It’s an exciting use of color and pigment.” Moran’s daughter Ruth was fond of saying that the first time her father saw the Green River in 1871 was “the first time he saw the color and possibilities of the American West,” Ms. Braff said.