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TRAVEL/TOURS ADVERTORIAL48 NADFAS REVIEW / AUTUMN 2016 www.nadfas.org.ukForce of natureThe colours and forms of the Grand Canyon have inspired countless artists – including Thomas Moran, whose Romantic landscapes wereinstrumental in the development of the National Parks of the USA It is 277 miles long and can be seen from space, but the Grand Canyon is surprisingly hard to spot at ground level. From the south, the road crosses a plateau with no hint of the marvels to come – then suddenly the earth opens up to reveal a gorge a mile deep.Many tribes have called the canyon home since the fi rst human habitation 12,000 years ago. At Nankoweap Creek the cliff walls are still dotted with the granary niches of Ancestral Puebloan people, the fi rst to live in the area, while archaeological activity has revealed thousands of other pieces of evidence. However, for hundreds of years after European settlement, the presence of the canyon remained unknown to all but a small handful of newcomers. In fact, it was only after exploration of routes to California in the 1860s, including expeditions by naturalist John Wesley Powell, that the Grand Canyon became part of the national consciousness. Landscape painter Thomas Moran (1837–1926) was instrumental in bringing the beauty of the canyon to wider audiences when he accompanied Powell’s third trip in 1873. Moran had come to the US as a child; his parents were weavers who had left Lancashire after mechanisation was introduced. Moran honed his drawing skills while working at a Philadelphia wood engraving fi rm and through his brother Edward’s apprenticeship to marine painter James Hamilton, but it was a visit to London that had the greatest impact. Profoundly infl uenced by JMW Turner, he returned to the US where he was commissioned to depict the landscapes of Wyoming in 1871. His two most famous paintings, The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone and The Chasm of the Colorado – both monumental artworks over 2.5m across, now in the Smithsonian – helped to convince Congress to create the Yellowstone National Park rather than sell off the land.Moran’s work on the Grand Canyon inspired many other artists, including Gunnar Widforss, Grafton Tyler Brown and Franz Bischoff, aided by the Santa Fe Railway, which used artworks on publicity material in order to encourage travellers to the west. One contemporary, Louis Akin, was the fi rst artist to make Arizona a permanent home; his portraits of the local Hopi tribespeople and Romantic landscapes of the canyon and its environs are still well known. As tourist numbers swelled, a number of lodges and small buildings were erected along the South Rim of the canyon. Among the most famous are several designed at the beginning of the 20th century by the architect Mary Colter (who also designed the Pueblo-style