Gardiner's Bay from Fresh Pond, Long Island

Mary Nimmo Moran's etching Gardiner's Bay from the Fresh Pond, Long Island focuses on an unpaved path coursing diagonally from the lower left across a rustic wooden bridge at the edge of Fresh Pond, on eastern Long Island, New York. A partial view of the pond anchors the lower right of the composition, while at left a stream meanders towards distant Gardiner's Bay, where two sailboats float beneath a sky filled with billowing clouds. One of the etching's darkest areas, a dense cluster of lines, denotes a thicket of trees along the crest of a dune-like hill. Moran used the delicate lines characteristic of the etching needle to celebrate the varied forms and textures of land, foliage, water, and sky.

Attracted to the rural and coastal terrain of Long Island, Moran and her husband, celebrated painter Thomas Moran, made East Hampton their home in 1884, the year she made this print. Moran based this etching and Twilight, Easthampton (TF 1996.82) on specific sites she sketched in the surrounding countryside. Eastern Long Island was then a rural region gradually being developed as a seasonal haunt of affluent New Yorkers. In Moran's etching, it retains its historical character as a sleepy backwater, with its characteristic terrain of marsh and low-lying dunes reminiscent of the landscape of Holland as pictured by seventeenth-century Dutch painters.

Klackner, Christian. A Catalogue of the Complete Etched Work of Thomas Moran, N.A. and M. Nimmo Moran, S.P.E. New York: C. Klackner's, 1889. No. 34, p. 20.

Friese, Nancy. Prints of Nature: Poetic Etchings of Mary Nimmo Moran. (exh. cat., Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art). Tulsa, Oklahoma: Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art, University of Tulsa, 1984. Pp. 13–14.