Communipaw, N.J. is a rare example of Thomas Moran portraying an industrial scene.¹ Signs of human activity appear primarily on the horizon: the tall masts of ships huddle together on the right; dominating the center is a factory belching thick plumes of black smoke into the air; and on the left a dock juts out into the waterway. Moran uses the foreground to convey the sense of a vast wasteland where pools of water lie still and stagnant, going nowhere.

For us today, the etching seemingly proclaims: This is what human beings have done. The activity depicted on the horizon led to the bleak environment laid out before us in the foreground, and a gloomy sky presides over it all, empty but for the dark smudges of industrial emissions. As art historian Linda C. Hults noted, the grim and grimy quality of Communipaw suggests the artist’s alarm at an “industry that sullied the air.”²

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

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¹ Other examples of Moran works in the Gilcrease collection that may allude to industry are Toothill Bridge, Bolton, Lancashire (02.801) and Near Feltville, N.J. (02.789). Mary Nimmo Moran also portrayed industrial New Jersey several years earlier in Newark, N. J. from the Passaic (14.76h).
² Hults, “Thomas Moran and the Landscape Print,” 44. The etching's alternate title, January Thaw — Communipaw, sometimes used with third state impressions such as 14.430f, implies we are viewing ice breaking up on the waterway, yet that does not appreciably brighten the scene. The alternate title, however, may suggest the artist did not intend for the work to be interpreted as a statement of his environmental concerns, an idea pursued by art historian Vanessa Meikle Schulman in Work Sights, 123–54. Schulman discusses Moran’s ink wash After a Thaw — Communipaw Ferry (1879, Guild Hall, East Hampton, x26) and his oil painting Lower Manhattan from Communipaw, New Jersey (1880, Washington County Museum of Fine Arts, Hagerstown, Maryland, A0303,40.0001), both of which depict the same area portrayed in this etching. After a Thaw received good reviews when exhibited, and according to Schulman this positive feedback led to the production a year later of Lower Manhattan from Communipaw, New Jersey. Schulman contends that Moran did not necessarily create the artworks as an ecological statement, but rather made them to attract new patrons. As Schulman observes, industrial progress and its attendant financial opportunities presented a thorny quandary for many people during the nineteenth century, dilemmas the arts might allay by presenting industry in an artful manner. In addition, Moran’s artfully composed images of Communipaw could have been an effort by the artist to resolve his own conflicted feelings about the ties between his art and commerce.