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Mary Nimmo Moran
1842–1899
BirthplaceStathaven, Scotland
Death placeEast Hampton, New York, United States of America
BiographyMary Nimmo Moran was acknowledged in her day as one of the leading American artists making landscape prints in the etching medium. Born Mary Nimmo in Strathaven, Scotland, she was the daughter of a weaver. Following her mother's death when Mary was five, she immigrated with her father and brother to the United States, settling in Crescentville, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia. At the age of twenty, in 1862, Mary married landscape painter Thomas Moran, who taught her to paint in oils and in watercolors. Five years later, after the birth of the first of their three children, the Morans traveled abroad, painting their way across France, Italy, and Switzerland as they studied the works of masters in museums and galleries.
In 1871, Mary accompanied her husband on an exploratory expedition to Yellowstone, in the present-day state of Wyoming, as he created pictorial documentation of the wonders of the American West. The sale of his resulting work enabled the Morans to purchase a home in Newark, New Jersey, where the surrounding countryside provided abundant subjects for Mary's landscape paintings. She exhibited these at the venerable Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and at New York's National Academy of Design. She made a further excursion to the West with Thomas in 1873.
In 1879, Thomas taught Mary how to make etchings. She soon immersed herself in the medium, and in 1880 "M. Nimmo" was elected a member of the New York Etching Club; the following year, when her work was shown at the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers in London, she was invited to join that organization. Mary's prints were widely praised; some reviewers of a joint husband-and-wife exhibition in 1889 hailed them as superior in vigor and expression to her husband's. Mary made nearly seventy etchings of British and American landscape settings, including eastern Long Island, where the couple purchased a home in 1884. She traveled widely with her husband in the 1880s and 1890s. In 1893, her prints garnered a medal at the important art display at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Her successful etching career was cut short at the age of fifty-seven when she died of typhoid fever while nursing one of her daughters infected by the same disease. Today Mary Moran is acknowledged as one of the leaders of the American etching revival of the late nineteenth century.
In 1871, Mary accompanied her husband on an exploratory expedition to Yellowstone, in the present-day state of Wyoming, as he created pictorial documentation of the wonders of the American West. The sale of his resulting work enabled the Morans to purchase a home in Newark, New Jersey, where the surrounding countryside provided abundant subjects for Mary's landscape paintings. She exhibited these at the venerable Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and at New York's National Academy of Design. She made a further excursion to the West with Thomas in 1873.
In 1879, Thomas taught Mary how to make etchings. She soon immersed herself in the medium, and in 1880 "M. Nimmo" was elected a member of the New York Etching Club; the following year, when her work was shown at the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers in London, she was invited to join that organization. Mary's prints were widely praised; some reviewers of a joint husband-and-wife exhibition in 1889 hailed them as superior in vigor and expression to her husband's. Mary made nearly seventy etchings of British and American landscape settings, including eastern Long Island, where the couple purchased a home in 1884. She traveled widely with her husband in the 1880s and 1890s. In 1893, her prints garnered a medal at the important art display at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Her successful etching career was cut short at the age of fifty-seven when she died of typhoid fever while nursing one of her daughters infected by the same disease. Today Mary Moran is acknowledged as one of the leaders of the American etching revival of the late nineteenth century.