The title of this etching, East Hampton Barrens, alludes to the broad, seemingly desolate stretch of sand depicted in the foreground. Mary Nimmo Moran’s portrayal of the plants that manage to grow on these windswept dunes, however, suggests there is life here. The trees to our right create a windbreak for the building peeking out to the side. A solitary figure approaches on the horizon, drawing us back to another arboreal line, behind which is one of the town’s windmills.¹ Nimmo Moran transforms what may at first appear a bleak landscape into a place where humans and nature have found the means to coexist.

East Hampton Barrens is not only one of the artist’s first etchings but also one of her first images of a place prominently featured in her etched work of the 1880s.² Nimmo Moran first visited East Hampton, Long Island, with her husband and fellow artist Thomas Moran (1837–1926) during the summer of 1878. They returned most summers for extended stays, eventually building a home and studio on Main Street.³ Nimmo Moran’s etchings of East Hampton, however, do not focus on the town but on the surrounding landscape, and they merely hint at human habitation.⁴

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

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¹ Vittoria, “Nature and Nostalgia in the Art of Mary Nimmo Moran,” 100. Vittoria notes that today most New Yorkers would recognize this as East Hampton from the windmill. Americans living in Nimmo Moran’s era may have known this as well because of D. Appleton and Company’s Picturesque America, published in forty-eight parts over two years in the 1870s. It included an article by Oliver Bell Bunce entitled “Scenes in Eastern Long Island,” which stated that the windmills were unique to East Hampton and included an illustration of them.
² Vittoria, “Nature and Nostalgia in the Art of Mary Nimmo Moran,” 157–82. Nimmo Moran’s other debut etchings completed in 1879 are The St. Johns River, FL (14.841), Bridge over the Delaware, Easton, Pa. (14.74a), Bridge over the Bushkill, Easton, Pa. (14.71a), Newark, N.J. from the Passaic (14.76a), and Hay-ricks, Newark Meadows (14.77a). According to family lore, The St. Johns River, FL was the artist’s first etching, completed from memory of a trip to Florida in 1877. The second and third depict Easton, Pennsylvania, where Nimmo Moran stayed with relatives during her husband’s absence. She stopped in East Hampton on her way back to the couple’s home in Newark, New Jersey, which accounts for East Hampton Barrens and the two Newark etchings.
³ Vittoria, “Nature and Nostalgia in the Art of Mary Nimmo Moran,” 202. In November 1883, Nimmo Moran was issued a deed for two-thirds of an acre on East Hampton’s Main Street.
⁴ See also Nimmo Moran’s In the Sandhills (14.85j), The Goose Pond, East Hampton (14.88b), Under the Oaks — Georgica Pond (14.123a), and "Tween the Gloaming and the Mirk” (14.92f).