In his painting A Yellowstone Geyser (1887), artist Grafton Tyler Brown captures the moment of eruption for a thermal geyser at Yellowstone National Park. Brown centers the composition of this work around the assurgent momentum of the geyser’s spray – dividing the canvas in two with swift, upward brushstrokes of white, gray, and blue. With the eruption spanning a majority of the image’s height, Brown utilizes this titular feature of the work to guide the viewer’s eye in a sudden and singular moment from the bottom portion of the image to the top.

Perpendicular to this vertical motion, Brown incorporates a low horizon line at a point of intersection with the summit of the geothermal vent. This directional contrast captures the viewer’s eye after their initial ascensive glance, drawing them both across the painting, as well as further into the illusory depth of the image. Brown composes and differentiates the receding space into three distinct parallel bands of paint. The lowest, a muddled, grassy field in sweeping strokes of yellow-green and brown, rests beneath a line of trees abstracted in distance, recognizable through thin brown trunks, shrouded in dark green paint. Brown situates these under a stark line of nearly solid white paint, applied in broad, lateral motions. Emerging from this brief horizontality,  Brown continues the heightened verticality of the geyser's eruption, surrounding it with an active, stormy image of the sky. Here, Brown interweaves shades of blue, pink, purple, and gray in brushstrokes leading in a multitude of directions, all encircling the sharp rupture of the geyser at its center.

Brown’s configuration of the image accentuates the geyser’s dynamism and motion. In his depiction, he conjoins the abrupt movement of the geyser with that of the viewer’s gaze, allowing for his audience to experience the painting as if it were an existent geyser erupting in nature, as opposed to the flat surface of a tableau. This dynamic composition begins at the lowest edge of the canvas, as Brown guides the viewer toward the peak of the geothermal vent. Reinforcing the upward motion of the geyser’s eruption through the cropped, triangular contours of the pooled water at its foot, Brown shapes the foreground into an inviting path for the viewer’s eye to follow. This initial ease into the painting’s central motion, however, is simultaneously denied by Brown through the bright blue and orange hues utilized in the foreground – revealing the supposed ‘path’ as boiling water, typical of a geothermal vent. With the complication of this supposed direct path into the painted space, Brown keeps the viewer at a distance from the subject matter of his image, further emphasizing the depth constructed on the flat surface of the canvas.

To further the illusion of perspective and dimension on the flat, canvas surface, Brown incorporates a variety of brush strokes styles in this painting. Closest to the viewer, Brown depicts the painting’s foreground with a clarity of shape, defining stone with precise shadows and highlights. Further out toward the horizon, Brown’s brushwork takes on a more painterly, abstracted style, capturing vast amounts of area in simplified swaths of color – mimicking the eye’s weakened perception of distance. Above this, Brown creates the sky through a series of dramatic brush strokes, with an attention to illumination and contrast similar to the technique utilized in the image’s foreground. Interconnecting and leading the viewer through these spaces, Brown depicts the eruption of the geyser in gestural, rapid brushstrokes – capturing the movement of the water in both its initial upward spray, as well as those drafting backwards, caught in the wind.

Moreover, Brown again accentuates the geyser and its eruption through the shape of the canvas itself. In stark contrast with the conventional horizontal dimensions favored by his contemporaries of landscape painting, Brown uses an exaggerated vertical canvas – one nearly triple in height what it measures in width. The unique size and display of this tableau echo the verticality of the geyser’s eruption, visually encouraging the viewer’s eyes to follow water as it jets upward – rather than following the width of the canvas, and horizontally surveying the land.