Thomas Moran

Famed for his grand-scale paintings of the American West, Thomas Moran was associated with the nineteenth-century American landscape painters, known as the Hudson River school. Born in Lancashire, England, Moran grew up in Philadelphia. After a brief apprenticeship in an engraving firm, he began working in the studio of his older brother Edward, a landscape painter, and sketching in the countryside around Philadelphia. In 1862, the Moran brothers traveled to England to study the works of English Romantic artist J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851); Thomas returned to Europe for further study in 1866. By that date, he had begun exhibiting with success at Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and his career was truly launched in 1872, when the United States Congress appropriated the then-enormous sum of $10,000 to purchase his Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (1872; Smithsonian American Art Museum). Moran’s masterpiece was the product of his participation in the first government-sponsored expedition to Yellowstone; his illustrations for the resulting survey helped convince the government to preserve the region as a national park.

In the course of Moran’s long and commercially successful career he traveled widely throughout the West. On site he executed glowing watercolor paintings that served as the basis of large-scale, studio-executed depictions of such places as Arizona’s Grand Canyon, the Colorado Rocky Mountains, and Green River, Wyoming. He also worked in Venice (Italy), Cuba, and Mexico, and he painted idyllic scenes near his home in East Hampton on Long Island, New York, and industrial scenes around New York Harbor.