Modern Age
Thomas Moran (1837–1926)
American Hudson River School painter.
Thomas Moran was born in Bolton, England, in 1837 and came to the United States as a boy when his family settled near Philadelphia in 1844. He trained first as a wood-engraver and illustrator, learned to paint largely on his own, and took his decisive lessons from the marine painter James Hamilton and, above all, from the canvases of J.M.W. Turner, which he studied and copied on trips to England beginning in 1861. From Turner he took a lifelong faith in atmospheric, glowing light and in a landscape that idealizes rather than merely records.
In 1871 Moran joined Ferdinand V. Hayden's federal geological survey of the Yellowstone region, traveling alongside the photographer William Henry Jackson. The watercolor field studies he brought back, together with Jackson's photographs, were shown to members of Congress and helped persuade them to set aside Yellowstone as the first national park in 1872. That same year Congress bought his enormous canvas 'The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone' for the Capitol, and a companion survey of the Colorado River yielded 'The Chasm of the Colorado.' Moran adopted the monogram 'T.Y.M.' — Thomas 'Yellowstone' Moran — and made the grandeur of the American West his life's subject.
Over the following decades, aided by the expanding western railroads, Moran returned again and again to the Rocky Mountains, the Grand Canyon, the Green River cliffs of Wyoming, and the Colorado peaks, producing luminous large-scale oils, watercolors, and etchings. Long based in the New York area — Newark, New York City, and East Hampton on Long Island — he moved late in life to Santa Barbara, California, where he died in 1926. He is remembered, with Albert Bierstadt, as the defining painter of the Rocky Mountain School and an heir to the Hudson River School tradition.
The words the record keeps using: sublime, grand, luminous, atmospheric, romantic, panoramic, reverent.
At a glance
- Lived 1837–1926
- Origin American
- Worked in New York
- Era Modern Age
- Movements Hudson River School, Rocky Mountain School
- Mediums Oil on canvas, Engraving and etching, Watercolor
- Techniques Oil glazing, Atmospheric perspective, En plein air painting
Works in the archive
- Children of the Mountain, 1866 (American Museum of Western Art – The Anschutz Collection, Denver)
An early, ambitious wilderness scene painted before Moran had ever seen the West, in which a mountain torrent tumbles through a rugged, boulder-strewn gorge under a turbulent, storm-lit sky. Made in his Philadelphia… - The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, 1872 (Smithsonian American Art Museum (lent by the U.S. Department of the Interior Museum))
Moran's breakthrough masterpiece, worked up from the watercolor studies he made on Ferdinand Hayden's 1871 survey of the Yellowstone region. The vast canvas looks down the canyon's yellow-and-rose walls toward the Lower… - The Chasm of the Colorado, 1873 (Smithsonian American Art Museum (lent by the U.S. Department of the Interior Museum))
The companion to the Yellowstone canvas, drawn from Moran's 1873 trip to the Grand Canyon of the Colorado in the company of John Wesley Powell's survey. Where the Yellowstone painting is radiant, this is a darker, more… - Snowy Range, 1896 (Denver Art Museum)
A serene later mountain landscape in which a still, turquoise alpine lake leads back to a brilliant snow-capped range beneath a clear deep-blue sky. Painted at the height of Moran's fame, it shows the calmer, more…
What was said
Moran maintained that he placed no value on literal transcripts from nature and that topography in art was worthless; his aim, he said, was not realistic but toward idealization, choosing and composing so as to convey the true character and grandeur of a place rather than a mechanical record of it.
Moran regarded J.M.W. Turner as the supreme landscape painter and, on his early trips to London, studied and copied Turner's canvases at the National Gallery, adopting the older artist's glowing atmosphere and idealizing treatment of light as the foundation of his own manner.
Scholarship credits Moran's vivid Yellowstone watercolors from the 1871 Hayden survey, shown together with William Henry Jackson's photographs, with helping persuade Congress to establish Yellowstone as the first national park in 1872 and, that same year, to purchase Moran's large canyon canvas for the Capitol.
Lineage
Learned from Albert Bierstadt
Passed on to J.M.W. Turner, Albert Bierstadt
What would Thomas make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Thomas Moran", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Thomas · Keep a life moment the way Thomas would · Pictures made after Thomas