Museum accessions.

 
They saw the gleaning river seaward flow 
From the inner land; far off, three mountain-tops, 
Three silent pinnacles of aged snow, 
Stood sunset-flushed; and, dew'd with showery drops, 
Up-clomb the shadowy pine above the woven copse. 

When Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote these lines in the "Lotos-Eaters" (1832), one wonders if he visualized a scene as majestic as that which Thomas Moran, inspired by it, painted some sixty years later. The poem is one of the poet laureate's best, and Moran has done it justice. The lotus-eaters were Odysseus's Greek sailors far from home, seduced by the exotic potions of the North Africans (Lotophagi).

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Moran, greatly influenced by the works of Joseph Mallord William Turner (see p. 22 of this issue), created many grandiose landscapes, particularly of the American West. He made eight major trips west from 1871 to 1892 (and then later moved to Santa Barbara). On a number of occasions he was inspired by literary themes; notably in the 1860s and 1870s, when he painted three canvases describing wilderness settings for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha (1855).

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Moran developed the dramatic atmosphere in The Lotus Eaters (illustrated below) almost solely in the sky. There, following a convention of romanticism, sunlight and moonlight coexist above a wild and rough coastline. The only sign of human life is the galley with full sails approaching at the far left. This large stunning landscape based on expansive western scenery is a recent bequest to the Portland Museum of Art in Maine. It is on view, in a Carrig-Rohane Shop frame from the 1920s, and is sure to be one of the prized works in the collection.

So too is a much smaller but wonderful early landscape by the modernist Edward Hopper (illustrated at top right). In the summers between 1916 and 1919, Hopper painted on Monhegan Island ...