Oil on canvas, 20 x 33 inches (47 1/2 x 34 1/2 inches with frame)

PROVENANCE
Sloan & Roman, Inc., Madison Ave, New York
Private collection since the 1960s

Edward Moran moved with his family to New York City in 1870.  During this time, New York harbor was bustling with marine traffic.  While in New York, Moran had the opportunity to work with the luminist artists John F. Kensett, Martin Johnson Heade and Sanford R. Gifford, who all exhibited regularly at the National Academy of Design.  Moran quickly absorbed the concepts of luminism and for several years experimented with this aesthetic.  As a result, in the early 1870s his palette brightens, his compositions are simpler, and the light in his paintings is more atmospheric.

Born in England, Edward Moran is best known for his marine paintings, and is credited with the Moran family's entry into the art world.  His family immigrated to Maryland in 1844 from Lancashire, England, where his father was a handloom weaver.  Edward, who was one of twelve children, left home to work in a cotton factory in Philadelphia.  He impressed his employer with the large, wall-sized, sketches he did, and was encouraged to pursue art as a career.  He and his brother studied and shared a studio in Philadelphia and then both returned for a time to England. There copying the paintings of J M W Turner heavily influenced them.

In the mid-1850s, when Philadelphia was experiencing the peak of the U.S. clipper ship production, Edward was influenced by James Hamilton, a prominent Irish-born marine painter, and also by landscapist Paul Weber.

Edward was known for his silvery tones and loose accents of light.  He developed a style based primarily upon English painting of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, notably J.M.W. Turner, and seventeenth-century Dutch painting.

Moran was also a history painter, but chose marine painting to represent his work.

Edward was the father of the genre painter Percy (Edward Percy) Moran.  Although Edward's more famous brother, Thomas, known as the primary artist of the final decades of Western exploration, perhaps overshadows him in the history of art, it was commonly thought that at the time of his death in 1901 Edward Moran had no superior in marine painting in America.

Public Collections:
Butler Institute of American Art, OH
Chrysler Museum, VA
National Museum of American Art, Washington D.C.
United States Naval Academy, MD
Denver Art Museum
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Boston Museum of Fine Arts
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.

Memberships:
American Watercolor Society
National Academy of Design
Philadelphia Sketch Club
Society of Illustrators
Lotus Club

IMAGE

WITH FRAME