THOMAS MORAN
LAKE OF THE WOODS, BY THOMAS MORAN
THOMAS MORAN
Thomas Moran, who was one of three brothers, all distinguished in art, came with them to this country from England in 1844, when he was seven years old. He continues to our day the traditions of Church; not directly, for his training came from an entirely different source, but by his natural preference for Nature in her more striking and impressive forms. A trip to the Yellowstone as early as 1871 furnished him with a series of subjects peculiarly his own; but, while he has always found matter for his brush in the marvels of the great West, he has added to them many of the most beautiful scenes of Great Britain, Switzerland, Venice, and the Orient, rendering them all with a sure facility and brilliance that make his canvases recognizable at a glance.
In contrast to these men, who sought to give interest and dignity to their work by choosing imaginative or strange, far-sought subjects, may be placed those whose interest was rather in the familiar native landscape that lay about them, who found in it beauty sufficient for their needs if only they could fully express the emotions with which it inspired them. The two schools are anything but rigidly separated. The idealists made careful studies from nature, and the realists attempted excursions into allegory or scenic beauty; but the fundamental difference of the point of view is sufficiently marked.
The two founders of our landscape schools are typical examples of the two temperaments. Thomas Cole, born abroad, with much of the sentimentality of Europe of that time, was a dreamer, sensitive, shy, living in his visions.