Bridge over the Schuylkill, Philadelphia displays the young Thomas Moran’s budding talent with a challenging medium, watercolor. Using a limited palette of browns, blues, and greens, Moran deftly portrays an African American man fishing in the calm waters of the Schuylkill River, with the bridge and the Neoclassical architecture of Fairmount Water Works providing the backdrop. Moran made two distinctive choices in creating this image, both potentially emblematic of an appeal to civic pride.

In the years before the Civil War (1861–65), Philadelphians took pride in their leadership of the abolitionist cause. The first society for abolition was founded there in 1775, and by the 1850s, the city had become a nexus for the Underground Railroad. As a result, a large population of free people of color resided in the city, one of whom Moran has seemingly chosen to depict in this watercolor.¹ In addition, Moran has depicted Fairmount Water Works in the distance, another point of pride for Philadelphians.² The construction of the Water Works was the city council’s response to the public’s need for clean drinking water after several deadly typhoid fever epidemics had swept the city.

Moran perhaps thought that subject matter suggesting the freedom enjoyed by an African American to go fishing, set against the backdrop of one of the technological wonders of the city, would appeal to Philadelphians. The artist did have a canny ability to choose subjects that would find an audience, and Bridge over the Schuylkill perhaps displays this burgeoning skill as well as his growing talent as a watercolorist.

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

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¹ The situation for African Americans in Philadelphia was complex. Philadelphian and African American Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859–1937) decided to become an artist after seeing a landscape painter at work in Fairmount Park, and he went on to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA). This might suggest a life of equal access and equal opportunity for African Americans in the city. There were, however, incidents of racial hostility while Tanner was a student at PAFA and he left the United States permanently in 1914 to live in France. When asked why he left, Tanner reported that he would never be fulfilled as an artist if he had to fight racism in the States on an ongoing basis. David C. Driskell, preface to Marley, Henry Ossawa Tanner, 9–10, 17–20.
² Joan Carpenter Troccoli, introduction to Thomas Moran: The Field Sketches, 4. Moran’s sketch Fairmont Water Works, Philadelphia (13.769) is also in the Gilcrease collection.