| Thomas Moran | ||
| Birth Date: February 12, 1837 |
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| Death Date: August 25, 1926 Artist Gallery |
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| Thomas Moran was born in England, but when the Industrial Revolution put his father, a handloom weaver, out of work, he brought the family to Pennsylvania in 1844. Both Thomas and his brother Edward were artists who worked together and took sketching trips in the forests surrounding Philadelphia. They traveled to England in 1862, where Moran copied Turner’s paintings and his luminous style in the Tate Gallery. Moran is better known for his paintings of the American West, beginning around 1871 with his first trip to Yellowstone.
When Thomas returned from studying in England in, he married Mary Nimmo after a two-year courtship in 1863. Mary was vivacious, well liked, intelligent and warm, and her marriage to Thomas was well suited and happy for them both. The Moran’s built a summer home in Easthampton.
Moran first went to Venice in 1886 where he made watercolor sketches that would be the basis of paintings made in his studio in the United States. The views of Venice were enormously popular near the end of the nineteenth century, in part because the city seemed like a poetic, Old World refuge from an industrialized America that was pushing full speed into the next century. He painted many views of the Grand Canal and the Venetian Lagoon over the next ten years. “Sunset, Venice,” depicts the entrance to the Grand Canal, with the Doges’s Palace slightly to the right of center and the tower in St. Mark’s Square behind. The domed church to the left of the canal is Santa Maria delle Salute.
Moran recreated the effects of luminosity in his watercolor sketches that has a freshness and immediacy in this final version produced in his studio.
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