This Day in Art History (Death of Thomas Moran, Painter of Dramatic Western Landscapes)

Aug. 25, 1926— Thomas Moran, a British emigrant whose many sweeping landscapes led him to become known as “the dean of American painting,” died at age 89 at his home in Santa Barbara, CA.

His most significant art resulted from his participation in Ferdinand V. Hayden's 1871 Geological Survey Expedition to the Yellowstone region in the West. When he returned east, Congress bought for inclusion in the Capitol Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (pictured) and The Chasm of the Colorado, for the then-princely sum of $10,000 each.

The sensation that these sparked created a groundswell of support for creating, within a year, Yellowstone National Park—the cornerstone of the parks system that a Ken Burns documentary called “America’s Best Idea.”

Displacement motivated the Moran family’s migrations in his childhood, an involuntary movement that he would later convert to a more positive—and lucrative—wanderlust. 

His parents, who were handloom weavers, had left Dublin, Ireland for Bolton, Lancashire, England to improve their economic prospects. But mechanization put them out of work and compelled them to move to Kensington, just outside Philadelphia, PA.

While working as an apprentice at a local wood engraving firm, Moran took up painting and drawing, until he became adept at watercolors and illustrations. Influenced by British landscape painter J.M.W. Turner, Moran was uninterested in “realism,” but instead aimed for “idealization.” “The mere restatement of an external scene is never a work of art, is never a picture,” he explained.

Despite his strenuous attempts to build his practice and reputation, Moran was not a logical addition to the 1871 Geological Survey Expedition, in the eyes of others or even necessarily himself. First, the very idea of having an artist dedicated solely to recording impressions of a new territory hadn’t even occurred to the normally visionary Thomas Jefferson when he authorized the Lewis and Clark Expedition nearly seven decades before.

But the rumors of wonders in the Yellowstone region—along with entrepreneurs like Jay Cooke who hoped advertisements would stir travel to this virtually unknown American interior—sparked the need for a visual record of what was encountered. 

A railroad manager and friend of Moran’s urged Hayden to hire him for this purpose, with the added inducement that the artist would pay his own way and simply hoped for a cavalry escort for protection.

It does not appear that Hayden and his associates were informed that Moran was frail and had never trekked through anything approximating the physical environment where he would go now. But he quickly impressed his counterpart in photography on the expedition, William Henry Jackson, with his “fine courage…[N]one was more untiring on the trail, or less mindful of unaccustomed food or hard bed under a little shelter tent, than he was.”

For most of the 1870s, to be closer to New York publishers who published his work in their magazines, Moran and his wife Mary (another artist) lived in Newark, NJ. In the early 1880s they relocated to East Hampton, NY, the beginning of that town’s status as an art mecca. (Today, their studio is a National Historic Landmark overseen by the East Hampton Historical Society.)

Public taste can be fickle, and Moran had to adapt to buyers no longer interested in the Far West scenes that had once caused sensations. With obvious resignation about the changing art market, Moran told a reporter, "I prefer to paint western scenes, but the Eastern people don't appreciate the grand scenery of the Rockies. They are not familiar with mountain effects and it is much easier to sell a picture of a Long Island swamp than the grandest picture of Colorado."

Even after his beloved wife died in 1900, Moran continued to travel, in the company of his daughter Ruth or his old friend and expeditionary companion Jackson. He revisited the places that initially fascinated him while adding Venice as a subject of some of his most popular paintings.

It would take seven decades before the National Gallery of Art mounted the first major retrospective of Moran’s work, coinciding with the 125^th anniversary celebration of the creation of Yellowstone National Park. 

Museumgoers were able to behold on that occasion 97 paintings and watercolors and 17 photographs—including, most importantly, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, Chasm of the Colorado, and Mountain of the Holy Cross (1875), which Moran and his admirers were previously unable to convince Congress to keep together as one whole.

(For an informed analysis of Moran’s technique, I urge you to read landscape painter Stapleton Kearns’s April 2011 blog post.)