Edward Moran (19 Aug. 1829-9 June 1901), painter, was born in Bolton, Lancashire, England, the son of Thomas Moran and Mary Higson, home handloom weavers. Edward was the elder brother of the painters Peter, John, and Thomas Moran. Moran joined his parents working at the handloom at an early age. The Moran parents, like other home textile workers of the time, supplemented their income with work from their children. In April 1844 the family immigrated to the United States, landing in Philadelphia, and soon settled in Baltimore, Maryland, where the elder Moran was employed in a textile factory. In 1845 Thomas Moran, Sr., moved the family to Kensington, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia. After briefly trying other occupations, including carpentry and house painting, Edward Moran returned to the textile industry, not as a weaver but tending a power loom. After he had worked at the factory for seven years, Moran's supervisor (who, according to family legend, found Moran drawing instead of tending the loom) arranged an introduction to the prominent marine painter James Hamilton.
Apprenticeship was the standard career path for an aspiring artist. Hamilton, probably in need of an assistant for a major commission, took Moran on, and the two worked together for the next two years. When Hamilton left for London in 1854, Moran gravitated to the circle of the German-born landscape painter G. D. Paul Weber, who, though only six years older than Moran, was already an established artist.
Now living and working in a small studio in Philadelphia, Moran exhibited his first painting, View of the Susquehanna (unlocated), at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1854. After working briefly as a lithographer with little success, in 1855 he exhibited four paintings at the Pennsylvania Academy and completed The Storm (1855, Washington and Lee University). It was in the same year that his younger brother Thomas came to live with him. By that time Edward was exhibiting a number of paintings at the Pennsylvania Academy each year, had received attention in the art magazines, and was patronized by a number of prominent Philadelphians. In 1857 he exhibited at the National Academy of Design in New York and the recently formed Washington Art Association. In 1858 he exhibited even farther from Philadelphia, at the Boston Athenaeum.
With his career taking hold, Moran married Elizabeth McManes in 1859, and his younger brother Peter came to live with the couple. The couple had two children, Edward Percy and John Leon, who became minor painters. Soon after Elizabeth's death, Moran married, in 1869, Annette Parmentier, with whom he had a son, Thomas Sidney, also a painter.
Moran and his brother Thomas traveled to England in early 1861. Edward toured the English coast, making numerous sketches before returning to Philadelphia in October. The following year he exhibited seventeen works at the Pennsylvania Academy. He took part in two charity exhibitions in the 1860s: the first, in 1864, to raise funds for Union soldiers fighting in the Civil War, and the second, in 1865, for the Artists' Fund Society.
Moran, who had been exhibiting with the Pennsylvania Academy since 1854, fell into violent disagreement with its board of directors in 1868 when he felt his works were given an unfavorable position in the annual exhibition. He expressed his anger by cutting one of his paintings from its frame and covering others with an opaque (but removable) wash. John Sartain, acting on behalf of the board, censured Moran until he formally apologized for his behavior. Drawing widespread press coverage, the incident increased attendance at the academy, leading the directors of the academy to propose extending the exhibition. Moran, however, withdrew his paintings on the appointed closing day and displayed them at a commercial gallery, which earned him even more publicity. Going further, he refused to apologize and resigned from the academy.
Though he continued to exhibit in Philadelphia, his exhibition opportunities there were constrained by his break with the Pennsylvania Academy, and Moran decided to move to New York. An exhibition and sale in 1871 of seventy-five paintings achieved the two goals of raising funds for French victims of the Franco-Prussian War and cutting down on the number of paintings to be stored or transported during his move. After settling in New York in 1872, Moran was elected an associate of the National Academy of Design.
In the presence of works by Martin Johnson Heade, John Frederick Kensett, and Sanford Robinson Gifford at the National Academy of Design, Moran began to experiment with luminism. The use of filtered light, hazy brushwork, and the portrayal of mood over subject became a characteristic trait of Moran's throughout the 1870s. One example of Moran's experiments with luminism is Foggy Afternoon, New York Bay (1872, Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, Long Island, N.Y.).
Moran met the sculptor Frédéric A. Bartholdi in early 1876, on the occasion of the dedication of the Frenchman's statue of the marquis de Lafayette in Union Square. It was then that Moran was introduced to Bartholdi's idea for a monumental statue, Liberty Enlightening the World, to be erected in New York harbor. Inspired by Bartholdi's plan, Moran executed the monumental painting The Commerce of Nations Paying Homage to Liberty (private collection), which was displayed in October 1876 in New York City at a reception in Bartholdi's honor. The painting was subsequently displayed at various fundraising functions for the American Committee on the Statue of Liberty.
Inspired to travel again to Europe, Moran auctioned sixty-five of his paintings and a large collection he owned of works by other artists. Realizing $12,000 from the sale, he left for France in 1877. His travels exposed him to the work of the French Barbizon School and other plein-air painters. Moran returned to New York sometime before the spring of 1879, when he exhibited his "European" paintings at the National Academy of Design and the Brooklyn Art Association.
The 1880s saw Moran hailed as the leading American marine painter and praised in the Art Journal (Sept. 1880) for his "simple and easy naturalism." Discussing his technique in a series of articles for Art Amateur, Moran discussed not only the technical details of marine painting but also his working habits and the opinion that marine painting is a "particular branch of landscape painting" subject to all the same difficulties. Casco Bay, Coast of Maine (c. 1889, Heckscher Museum) is an unusual work from Moran's marine painting in its lack of anecdotal detail.
In the 1890s Moran turned to historical marine scenes, a genre he had not generally worked in before. Thirteen canvases were completed between 1891 and 1898 depicting the maritime history of America. The series, which includes Landing of Leif Eriksson in the New World in 1001, Return of the Conquerors, and Burning of the Frigate Philadelphia, is now in the collection of the U.S. Naval Academy Museum in Annapolis.
At the time of his death in New York City, Moran was eulogized as "having no superior in America" as a painter of the sea. Moran's achievement was soon neglected, however, and his fame eclipsed by that of his brother Thomas.
Bibliography
Moran's works are included in the collections of the U.S. Naval Academy; the Museum of the City of New York; the Philadelphia Athenaeum; and others. The Moran Family Papers are part of the Long Island Collection, East Hampton Free Library, N.Y. Moran's primary statement on his art is contained in two articles on marine painting for Art Amateur 19 (Oct. 1888): 101-3, and 19 (Nov. 1888): 127-28. Moran was profiled in "American Painter--Edward Moran," Art Journal (Sept. 1880): 258-59. Theodore Sutro, Thirteen Chapters of American History Represented by the Edward Moran Series of Thirteen Historical Marine Paintings (1905), includes a romantic sketch of the artist's life in unabashedly idolatrous terms; his account of Moran's early life is often at odds with the historical record. The catalog accompanying the exhibition at the Delaware Art Museum, Edward Moran (1829-1901), American Marine and Landscape Painter (1979), includes a useful biography by Paul D. Schweizer. A small exhibition brochure from the Heckscher Museum of Art, The Moran Family (1965), includes a useful family tree showing the relationships of the numerous artists in the Moran family. An obituary is in the New York Times, 10 June 1901.
