Arts: Moran

As it must to all men, Death came to Thomas Moran, painter. It found him in his 90th year in Santa Barbara. He was the last of four senior Morans illustrious in U. S. art: Edward, Thomas, Peter, and Mary Nimmo Moran, the Scotch painter-etcher who married her teacher, Thomas. There survive Leon and Percy Moran, sons of Edward.

An older Thomas Moran, ancestor of all, brought his family from Bolton, Lancashire, to Philadelphia in 1844. The boys went to the public schools. The talent of Edward, the eldest, developed first and it was he who first gave lessons to young Thomas after the latter had tried being a wood engraver’s apprentice, cabinetmaker, bronzeworker, housepainter, weaver, and mender of looms. Before long, Ruskin saw a plate by Thomas Moran Jr, in a London exhibition and singled it out as the finest contribution from the U. S.

The elder brother, Edward, launched upon a series, now celebrated, of epochal scenes in U. S. naval history, from Leif Ericsson to Admiral Dewey. Peter etched and painted animals. Thomas stuck to illustrating, doing as high as 250 plates in a single year. Off and on he visited Europe, but in 1871 and 1873 he made the trips that made his name, to the bright-hued rock-gorge country of the Far West with government geologists. It was an ideal locale for a devoted student of Turner and of nature’s iridescent color effects. Congress paid him $10,000 apiece for his companion canvases, “Chasm of the Colorado” and “Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone,” which were hung in the Capitol.

Santa Barbara knew him in its sunny winters. In the summers he repaired to an old fashioned cottage on the oceanward end of Long Island, at East Hampton, lingering there till autumn fogs moved through the scrub-oak and laurels and the wind blew cold over bright dunes. This year he went late to East Hampton, for burial.