Thomas Moran

I am returning to my chronicling of Americas landscape heritage tonight.There are a number of themes that have run through this blog and one of them has been a history of American landscape painting. My intention in this blog has been to lay out what I thought a painter, or at least a landscape painter ought to know. I think that being conversant witth the history of our nations art is very important. I love Americas art history the same way I love rock and roll. I think people imagine historical painting to be dry and unapproachable, sort of the way I feel about physics. But it is not for me, this stuff feeds me, I am entertained and excited by it. If you don't know this art I hope I can get you excited about it too. I am always shocked when I meet supposedly educated people from the finest schools alright, who are totally ignorant of their nations art history.

Thomas Moran 1837 -1926
I think Moran is a transitional figure. he usually gets lumped in with the Hudson river school painters, however, he was in his early thirties when the Hudson river school began began to fall from favor in the 1870's. His era is really ater this through the turn of the century. Like Inness he was infleunced by Corot and the luminists, although he idolized Turner as a young man. He made eight trips to what was then the WILD west and was best known for his paintings of Yellowstone. He went there with early geological survey teams in the 1870's and
returned to his studio in Newark, New Jersey to convert then into large dramatic studio paintings. Congress bought several and his art was influential in their decision to for4m Americas National Park system.

Here is a picture Moran did of the falls of the Yellowstone river in what is now Yellowstone National Park. I have painted this location, though my picture is much tamer. Moran is best known for these highly colored rather exaggerated pictures of the American west. However, the Moran pictures that interest me the most are those from Long Island, that though less grand are I think less bombastic and more artful.. Moran lived to be 90 and ended up in Santa Barbara, California.

I will now post a number of images by Moran that are an amalgam of the Hudson River school tradition and Barbizon school painting, These pictures are something I have recently been very interested in.Most people looking at Moran study the western art, but I am posting the lesser known eastern and more Barbizon like paintings.

Look at how Corot like this one is, Even the figure is more like something from a European painting than something American. That tree is so Corot . But there is an American wildness to the painting. The Europeans wanted paintings of nature tamed. Americans were comfortable with "that wilder image"This picture shows an influence from Dutch painting.This is much more designed and less bristling with tiny details than a Church or a Bierstadt.

Except for its color one might take this for a Hudson River painting.

Like Inness, Moran painted in Florida, this is a wild place though, I think of a Florida of trailer parks and golf courses. This Florida is as wild as Yellowstone. The treatment is more like Diaz than Church or Bierstadt though.

Here is another Grand Canyon picture. The background may be Hudson River school in treatment, but the foreground is an exaggerated vertical design that is more formal and less naturalistic than a Hudson River school painting.

Here is another abstract and vertical tree design without the canyon.

Here is a wonderful painting that I have printed out and put near my easel. It has none of the obsessive detail that sometimes mars the work of the Hudson River school painting and is largely a synthetic design. It could be anywhere. All of the detail is suggested and blurred.

I guess I have done my job tonight. I am typing away in a hotel room up in the White Mountains. I am often writing this blog on the road. Doing this blog is a discipline, I have written it in motel rooms all over New England, in South Carolina and across the Midwest as far as Minnesota.
See you all tomorrow. Goodnight.