One of the most well known parks in the United State is Yellowstone. One of the most well-known landscape artists is Thomas Moran. What does this place and person have in common? Well, if it weren’t for Thomas Moran Yellowstone would not be a National Park. Thomas Moran’s art was greatly influenced by the nature of the west in the early romantic era. Born in Bolton, Lancashire, England in 1837, Thomas was taken to the United States at the age of 7. (Ency. Bio. Vol. 11).
He was educated in Philadelphia public schools for his elementary years and then indentured to a wood engraving firm in 1853-1856. (Am. Nat. Bio. Vol 15). He had three brothers who were artist, but he learned to paint from his brother Edward Moran. He did do some watercolors during his apprentictionship and in 1856, he painted his first oil painting titled, Among the Ruins There He Lingered. (Vol. 11). Moran still working closely with his brother became an informer student of Philadelphia marine artist James Hamilton.
Hamilton may have introduced him to the work of J. M. W, turner and a belief in close study of nature in his foundation of panting. (Vol. 15) Moran exhibited landscapes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the fine arts for the first time in 1856 and then later elected academician in 1861. He continued to exhibit there through 1905. (Vol. 15). 1862 Thomas married Mary Nimmo who had always thought to be her husbands student. (Vol. 15). The beginning of his life had just started and didn’t know that he would accomplish so many feats with his artwork of nature.
Thomas would be in the category of romantic art for the theme of his artwork. He has based it on the beauty of nature and the fact that most of his major works were done in the period that romanticism took place, most of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Thomas Moran had attended the Hudson Valley River School, where many landscape artists had attended, too. He painted the Hudson Valley with the attraction, beauty, and scenery of the valley. (www. ency).
He also was attracted to the awesomely romantic images of American wilderness and the open west, where he did most of his paintings. (www. art) Thomas was fascinated with Yellowstone and wanting to be associated with it painted the wilderness and scenery of it. (Vol. 15) With the paintings he had done of Yellowstone Congress was fascinated with them, that they bought The Chasm and The Grand Canon of the Yellowstone Thomas had painted. (Vol. 15). Thomas appreciated the beauty of nature that shows through his artwork.
Thomas Morans style was very unique from other romantic landscape painters. In his painting The Grand Canon of the Yellowstone, he lured viewers through shadow foreground with engaging details to join two figures at an overlook in contemplation of the sunlit canyon. (Vol. 15) In the Chasm, Moran emphasized the river’s simultaneously destructive and regenerative forces and echoed the belief in the necessity of acknowledging the antithesis of a river raging through otherwise arid land. (Vol. 15).
When Moran painted Mountain of the Holy Cross in 1875 he used the season he went to his advantages. He used the clouds part to reveal the mountain’s deep, snow-filled gorges in the shape of a cross, reinforced popular views of this inaccessible place as one that embodied the Christian sanctity of American land, a subject that had preoccupied many painters before him. (Vol. 15) Moran also traveled where no other painters would, just to get that perfect sitting of the wilderness. (Vol. 15) Thomas’s style had beauty and nature in the paintings that he depicted and was very uniquely his own.
In conclusion, Thomas accomplished many things, he got Yellowstone to become a national park, he’s associated with the Grand Canyon, he has a mountain named after him which is called Mt. Moran, in the Teton Mountain range, many of his paintings in art museums across the United States and individual works of art on tours across Europe. Moran is one of the unique landscape artists from the romantic era and it shows through his artwork. Again Moran accomplished many things that were beneficial to everyone then and now. Moran died in Santa Barbara, California in 1926
