Thomas Moran Highlights, 1900s
Shoshone Falls on the Snake River
“Not since his first sight of the Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon had he been so stirred and thrilled.”1 —Ruth Moran on her father Thomas Moran’s visit to Shoshone Falls, 1929
Read More
Blue Lakes, Idaho
The rich blue-green hues of these lakes on the Snake River must have pleasantly startled Thomas Moran during his visit to Idaho. We can almost imagine him quickly reaching for his watercolors to create this field sketch. Once he achieved the sapphire and turquoise tones he desired for the water, the artist surrounded the lakes with a detailed contour drawing of the bluffs. Moran visited Idaho during the summer of 1900, accompanied by his daughter Ruth Moran. This was one of his first extended trips away from his home on the East Coast after the death of his beloved wife, the artist Mary Nimmo Moran (1842–1899).1
Read More
Moonlight on Napeague Beach, Montauk Point
A buff-colored path leads us into the dunes on Long Island’s Montauk Point. Although darkness shrouds the landscape, a full moon hugs the horizon and lights our way. We can imagine a quiet walk on the beach, a light breeze rippling through the foliage, and the sound of the waves gently lapping against the shore. Thomas Moran is perhaps best known for his paintings of the vast canyons, grand waterfalls, and towering rock formations of the American West, but he also produced quietly contemplative works such as this. He created the painting a few years after the death of his wife, fellow artist Mary Nimmo Moran (1847–1899). He may have made the work in her memory, as the couple had established a home on Long Island, and Montauk held a special significance in their lives.1
Read More
The Grand Canyon
By the early twentieth century Thomas Moran spent most winters sketching at Arizona’s Grand Canyon. Upon his return to the East Coast, he worked up paintings from his sketches, such as this oil on canvas from 1913.1 Art critic Forbes Watson (1879–1960), who occupied rooms next to Moran’s New York City studio, related that when the artist was well into his seventies, he “continued to practice his art with astonishing regularity.” Watson noted that Moran first blocked off his canvas, and then, “using small brushes, he would finish one square of the canvas inch by inch before moving over to another square, and the peaks of sunlit mountains would appear finished on one part of the canvas before the other parts of it had been touched.”2
Read More
Laguna Pueblo
In this oil painting, Thomas Moran portrays a whitewashed building at Laguna pueblo basking in the breaking light of dawn as the moon sets on the horizon. Although it was unusual for Moran to depict people, here he portrays several individuals descending the rough-hewn stairs on the hillside to begin their day. Moran visited pueblos in New Mexico and Arizona several times and included figural groups or chimney smoke in some of his paintings of those sites to suggest a human presence.1
Read More
Seascape
Although best known for his depictions of the American West, Thomas Moran produced several seascapes, including this one, created two years before his death. Silhouetted against the horizon, a ship tilts back and to its side, suggestive of one last, perilous journey for the artist as the art world was leaving Moran’s naturalistic renderings behind. By the turn of the century in the United States, many artists, critics, and collectors had accepted Impressionism as a legitimate means of visual expression—although Moran had not. When Georges Braque (1882–1963) and Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) exhibited their early experiments in Cubism at New York City’s 1913 Armory Show, the work was met with disdain by many, although some were intrigued. Others would come round as more and more avant-garde art movements emerged. By the early twentieth century, Moran’s style was becoming passé, and some in the art world now viewed his work with derision.1 Moran, however, defiantly carried on in a style and visual vocabulary established in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Read More
Hermit Chasm, Grand Canyon
In the years following the death of his wife, the artist Mary Nimmo Moran (1842–1899), Thomas Moran visited the Grand Canyon of the Colorado almost every winter. In return for commercial work for the Santa Fe Railroad, Moran received lodging at the El Tovar Hotel on the South Rim.1 He never tired of sketching his favorite views of the gorge to work up later into paintings such as The Grand Canyon (01.2351). Moran also explored the extensive network of side canyons, creating drawings such as this one of Hermit Chasm. The sketch reveals the steady hand of a mature artist, as Moran barely lifts his pencil from the paper to create the delicate outlines of the canyon walls in the foreground. He then delineates the distant buttes in an equally fine hand. Although Moran’s drawing suggests the region was uninhabited, it had in fact been home to a rather solitary Canadian.
Read More