Thomas Moran
Thomas Moran
1837 - 1926
American painter and printmaker of English birth. His brothers Edward (1829–1901), John ( 1831–1902) and Peter (1841–1914) were also active as artists. His family emigrated from England and in 1844 settled in Philadelphia where Moran began his career as an illustrator. He was guided by his brother Edward, an associate of the marine painter James Hamilton, whose successful career afforded an example for Moran. Between the ages of 16 and 19 Moran was apprenticed to the Philadelphia wood-engraving firm Scattergood & Telfer; he then began to paint more seriously in watercolour and expanded his work as an illustrator. In the 1860s he produced lithographs of the landscapes around the Great Lakes. While in London in 1862 (the first of many trips to England), he was introduced to the work of J. M. W. Turner, which remained a vital influence on him throughout his career. Moran owned a set of the Liber studiorum and was particularly impressed by Turner’s colour and sublime conception of landscape. With his wife, Mary Nimmo Moran (1842–99), an etcher and landscape painter, he participated in the Etching Revival, scraping fresh and romantic landscapes and reproductive etchings (e.g. Conway Castle, after J. M. W. Turner, 1879). During the 1870s and 1880s his designs for wood-engraved illustrations appeared in most of the major magazines and in gift books, which brought him money and recognition.
Between 1871 and 1892 Moran travelled extensively in the western USA, visiting Yosemite, the Teton Mountains, New Mexico and Arizona, as well as Mexico. He achieved his first success as a painter in oil and watercolour after he had been commissioned to illustrate a Scribner’s article on the Yellowstone area. During the summer of 1871 and in the company of the photographer WILLIAM HENRY JACKSON, Moran drew and painted in watercolour hundreds of sketches of the spectacular, and then virtually unknown, regions of Wyoming Territory. Moran kept these sketches (Yellowstone National Park) all his life. He used them as the basis for the many fully realized watercolours commissioned in the 1870s and for a very large painting, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (1872; Washington, DC, US Dept Interior, on loan to Washington, DC, N. Mus. Amer. A.). The reception of this picture as ‘the finest historical landscape yet painted in this country’ (New York Tribune) signalled Moran’s emergence as a rival to Albert Bierstadt and assured him recognition in the final years of the popularity of landscape as grand, exotic spectacle. The sketches were used as part of the successful campaign to designate Yellowstone the first national park. His monumental canvas was the first landscape painting to be purchased by the US government (in 1872) and quickly became a symbol of territorial exploration and westward expansion. It was followed two years later by an equally ambitious painting, Chasm of the Colorado (1873–4; Washington, DC, US Dept Interior, on loan to Washington, DC, N. Mus. Amer. A.), inspired by sketches made in the Grand Canyon region in 1873. Although the government purchased this painting as a pendant to Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, critics greeted it much less enthusiastically and most recoiled at its overpowering and forbidding vista, which for them lacked necessary human reference and, therefore, meaning. Perhaps influenced by such criticism, Moran never again attempted such a daring composition or so large a canvas, and he returned to more acceptable landscapes, such as the Mountain of the Holy Cross (1875; priv. col.).
Moran also visited Italy twice (in 1886 and 1890) and began to spend more time in East Hampton, Long Island, NY. His most lyrical paintings explore the relation of architecture to water in Venice and East Hampton. By 1900 Moran’s popularity had waned and many of his major canvases went unsold. Although he maintained his appeal with a broad public, he was out of favour with critics and artists. He spent his last years between East Hampton and Santa Barbara, CA, recreating his favourite subjects, especially the varied landscape of the Grand Canyon. [Carol Clark. "Moran, Thomas." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 9, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T059484.]
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