A woman in a long hoopskirt dress stands by two figures reclining on a blanket set with food and utensils. All the elements of a picnic are present in this drawing by Thomas Moran. A leafy tree to the left and a stout tree trunk on the right frame the scene, with a larger, lush tree dominating the middle ground. Additional figures walk on a path leading down from the picnic site to a waterway; perhaps they will join the people on the hillside for the feast, or perhaps they are a separate party. On the waterway, we can see a boat near a dock. As our gaze continues back, we notice a bridge in the middle ground and what appears to be a town clinging to the hillside in the distance. The artist has included a plethora of details in this charming scene, all on a piece of paper a little over nine inches in diameter!

A small drawing in a round format, such as this one, was probably a studio sketch prepared for one of Moran’s commercial enterprises. In the nineteenth-century, books, travel guides, magazines such as Scribner’s Monthly and The Aldine, and other publications often combined small circular illustrations¹ with the more common rectangular image format to provide visual interest. This picnic scene does not correspond to any known illustrations by Moran, but his commercial output was prodigious and scholars have not identified all of his graphic work.²

Although Moran dated the drawing to 1880, the setting with the view of the town in the distance resembles a variety of his Philadelphia scenes from the late 1850s and 1860s.³ A Picnic highlights Moran’s studio skills, as he combined visual elements from various field sketches or finished artworks to create something new. The small size of A Picnic also demonstrates one of the challenges of commercial work. For wood engravings, the engraver used the small end-grain surface of a block of wood rather than the broader cross-grain section. Thus, an artist had to develop the skills necessary to create imagery small enough to fit on a surface not much larger than their hand.⁴

—Sandra Pauly, Henry Luce Foundation Curatorial Scholar for Moran Collection Research, 2021

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¹ See for example Moran’s Pictured Rocks of Lake Superior (15.399).
² Art historian T. Victoria Hansen estimated Moran contributed to the production of five hundred wood engravings, with some works still unidentified. Hansen, “Thomas Moran and Nineteenth-Century Printmaking,” 15. In 1871, Moran provided illustrations for an article on Fairmount Park that appeared in the January issue of Scribner’s Monthly. None of those illustrations, however, corresponds to this image. I would also note this is not a preparatory sketch for Moran’s 1916 oil painting The Picnic (private collection), which depicts Pasadena, California.
³ See for example Bridge over the Schuylkill, Philadelphia (02.798) and Fairmount Water Works, Philadelphia (13.769). In addition, the figural group, which is used to bring the viewer into the scene, is reminiscent of Moran’s 1868 lithograph On the Susquehanna (14.638), or his 1862 drawing Hastings (13.900).
⁴ Sometimes publishers bolted blocks of wood together to give the artist or engraver a larger surface. The lines where the blocks met, however, could be seen in the final illustration.