Mary Nimmo Moran’s Evening on the St. Johns River, Florida presents a striking view of the twilight hour, as the sun descends through the clouds and a flatboat glides across the waterway toward shore.¹ Silhouetted against the evening sky, pines draped with Spanish moss create an ambience of tropical ease. Flanking the towering pines are palm trees of less lofty height, and the uneven tree line generates long, undulating shadows in the water, enhancing the mood of nightfall.

The nineteenth-century American art critic Alfred Trumble observed that “one notes” in Nimmo Moran’s etchings “not only the large lines and imposing masses of a landscape, analyzed and simplified to its fundamental dignity, but also a hint, in touches full of exquisite feeling, at the splendid embroidery in which nature garnishes herself.”² Trumble could have been referring to an Evening on the St. Johns River, as Nimmo Moran has so successfully portrayed this glorious sunset, one of nature’s marvelous embellishments.

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

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¹ Nimmo Moran traveled to Florida in 1877, 1887, and 1891 with her husband, artist Thomas Moran (1837–1926). See Anderson et al., Thomas Moran, 252; Morand, Thomas Moran: The Field Sketches, 77; and Morand and Friese, Prints of Nature, 4–5. Thomas Moran also created an etching of the St. Johns River, Florida (14.652). Gilcrease’s collection of artworks by the couple includes more than thirty-five drawings, watercolors, and etchings inspired by their visits to Florida.
² Trumble in Klackner, Catalogue of the Complete Etched Works, 6.

Etching with a layer of ink left on the plate to create an overall dark tone. Sandra Pauly, Henry Luce Foundation Curatorial Scholar for Moran Collection Research 3.21.22