A tangle of tree branches that have shed their leaves, empty wooden crates on the ground, and a lone ladder suggest that the autumnal activity of apple picking has come and gone. The workers have departed, the orchard is empty, and Thomas Moran has made the trees his primary focus. This modest subject may seem an interesting choice for an artist best known for his majestic images of the western United States, such as the Grand Canyon (see, for example, The Grand Canyon, 01.2351); however, Moran’s simple scenes of life in East Hampton, Long Island, account for about a quarter of his etchings. Moran and his wife, the artist Mary Nimmo Moran (1842–1899), made their home on East Hampton for part of the year, and the locale features prominently in her works, such as The Goose Pond, East Hampton (14.88b).¹

The works of the French Barbizon artists—who dedicated themselves to portraying the fundamental elements of the landscape in scenes of everyday rural life—inform the couple’s approach to the Hamptons. As artworks by the Barbizon School became popular with collectors in the United States, American artists followed suit. Some, including Nimmo Moran, even adopted their practice of etching directly from nature to capture an immediate, personal response to the scene.² Moran continued to create preliminary sketches, yet as art historian Linda C. Hults observes, his An Apple Orchard “most closely approaches the warmer, more intimate feeling for nature that Mary Nimmo Moran constantly exhibited.”³

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

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¹ See also Nimmo Moran’s In the Sandhills (14.85j), East Hampton Barrens (14.75a), Under the Oaks — Georgica Pond (14.123a), and Tween the Gloaming and the Mirk (14.92f).
² Wilkins, Thomas Moran: Artist of the Mountains, 55–57; Vittoria, “Nature and Nostalgia in the Art of Mary Nimmo Moran,” 9, 50–53, 94.
³ Hults, “Thomas Moran and the Landscape Print,” 32, 38 in Morand and Friese, The Prints of Thomas Moran. Wilkins suggests Moran etched An Apple Orchard directly from nature. Wilkins, Thomas Moran: Artist of the Mountains, 195. Art historian Linda C. Hults, however, notes that in 1976, while planning an exhibition of Moran’s work, curator Thomas Fern at the University of Notre Dame’s art gallery identified a preliminary sketch for the etching. See Fern’s exhibition catalogue The Drawings and Watercolors of Thomas Moran (1837–1926), nos. 74–75.