Thomas Moran

A celebrated American landscape painter, Thomas Moran was born in Bolton, England in 1837. Moran immigrated with his family to the United States in 1844, settling in Kensington, Philadelphia. His early exposure to art came through an apprenticeship with a wood-engraving firm, but he soon transitioned to painting, working in the studio of his brother Edward Moran, a marine artist.

There he developed an enduring interest in the English painter J.M.W. Turner and met James Hamilton, a landscape painter who was dubbed as an ‘American Turner’. Moran travelled to England with his brother in 1861 to study Turner’s work in person at the National Gallery in London, and he was indelibly influenced by the British artist’s depiction of light and use of watercolour.

As a prominent figure in the Hudson River School, a loosely associated group of Romantic American landscape artists which included Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran's paintings are characterised by their romantic and detailed depictions of the American landscape, capturing the sublime beauty of its vast and untamed wilderness.

Moran’s artistic journey took a pivotal turn in 1871 when he joined Ferdinand Hayden’s geological expedition to Yellowstone in Wyoming. The watercolours that resulted from this trip were instrumental in popularising Yellowstone and its establishment as the first National Park.

Another significant subject for Moran was the Grand Canyon. Moran’s illustrations of the dramatic landscape for the popular magazine Scribner’s Monthly are credited with helping to raise public appreciation of the region’s beauty. Gaining in popularity, his monumental canvas of the Grand Canyon was completed the following year, and was soon purchased by the government for US$10,000 to hang in the Capitol.

Moran continued to travel and paint in the decades that followed, capturing more of the American West, including the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, Wyoming and Utah, as well as the canyon lands of Arizona and New Mexico. Christie’s New York sold his painting of Green River of Wyoming (1878) in 2008 for US$17,737,000, establishing a world auction record for the artist. When he died in Santa Barbara, California, in 1926, he was remembered as the ‘Dean of American Landscape Painters’.