Stop and Look – Thomas Moran’s Fiercely the red sun descending/Burned his way along the heavens (1875-6)

Of all the artists influenced by J. M. W. Turner, the Philadelphia-born Thomas Moran was perhaps the most technically accomplished. This startling picture breathes the spirit of Turner not only in its glowing sunset colours but in the conviction with which it presents the uneasy surface of the ocean and the sense of recession over a great expanse of level water.

But Moran isn’t merely imitating his professional hero. He has a serious national purpose in view: giving visual embodiment to an American legend. 

The title of his picture comes from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s famous epic The Song of Hiawatha, published in 1855:

Fiercely the red sun descending 
Burned his way along the heavens,
Set the sky on fire behind him,
As war-parties, when retreating, 
Burn the prairies on the war-trail …

In his Hiawatha, Longfellow attempted to create an indigenous American mythology, amplifying existing Native American traditions. His magnificent simile comparing the evening sky to a prairie set alight by “war-parties” on the “war-trail” looks back to the epic literary example of Homer, perhaps giving Moran a precedent for his own backward glance at Turner, a composer of visual epics, such as Staffa, Fingal’s Cave, which had been in an American collection since 1845, or the Slave Ship, painted in 1840 and in the United States since 1872.

Fiercely the red sun … is one of three pictures in which Moran illustrates passages from Hiawatha. Although they are not identical in size, they seem to constitute a coherent group, suggesting that he had it in mind to produce a visual mythology for his country, building on what Longfellow had achieved. The other two subjects in the series, Hiawatha and the Great Serpent of Kenabeek and Hiawatha and the Pearl-Feather, also allude to Turnerian imagery.  

Moran’s epic intentions for the recording of American history and scenery found their most impressive outlet in two enormous canvases painted for the Hall of Representatives in Washington (and now in the Smithsonian Institution there): The Chasm of the Colorado and The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. 

Both measure over two by three and a half metres. They respond to the breathtaking discoveries of early expeditions to the far West in 1872 and 1873, when John Wesley Powell, a pioneer explorer, wrote of the “Book of Revelations in the rock-leaved Bible of geology”. These developments gave Americans a new sense of the antiquity and grandeur of their country, and Moran was prominent among those who sought to incorporate the indigenous peoples into that story.