Oil painting -> List of Painters -> Thomas Moran

   Thomas Moran

Early Days: Thomas Moran (February 12, 1837 - August 25, 1926) from Bolton, England was a painter and printmaker of the Hudson River School whose work often featured the Rocky Mountains. Thomas Moran along with Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Hill, and William Keith are sometimes referred to as belonging to the Rocky Mountain School of landscape painters because of all of the Western landscapes made by this group.

Career:

Moran's family emigrated from England in 1844 and settled in Pennsylvania. He began his artistic career as a teenage apprentice to the Philadelphia wood-engraving firm Scattergood & Telfer. After two years of training, he produced illustrations and works in watercolor and began developing lithographs of landscapes around the Great Lakes in the 1860s.

Moran was introduced to the work of J. M. W. Turner while studying in England in 1862, and acknowledged Turner's influence on his use of color and choice of landscapes. During the 1870s and 1880s Moran's designs for wood-engraved illustrations appeared in major magazines and gift oriented publications.