Moran, Edward
Brief Biography of the Artist
Edward Moran was born in 1829 in Bolton-le-Moor, Lancashire, on the northwest coast of England. In his childhood, he learned handloom weaving, the trade of his father. The Moran family emigrated to the United States in 1844, first residing in Maryland and moving a year later to Philadelphia. There, Edward worked as a cabinetmaker and house painter before joining a factory, where he supervised power-loom workers. Noting Moran’s artistic talent, his employer referred him to the German-born landscape painter Paul Weber (1823-1916), with whom he studied. He also received instruction from the marine artist James Hamilton (1819-1878), who encouraged him to paint maritime subjects. During these years, he also studied and copied the work of the British marine painter Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851).
In the mid-1850s, Moran supported himself by working as a lithographer; however, in 1857, he established his own studio and turned to painting full-time. In the ensuing years, he made frequent trips along the Atlantic coast, as far north as New Brunswick and south to Virginia, producing sketches that served as references for his large oils. He quickly made a name for himself as a marine painter, acclaimed for his depictions of ships battling stormy seas, vividly illuminated by brilliant sunset skies. Moran was elected an Academician of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, in 1860. He exhibited there regularly until 1869, when he resigned after a dispute concerning the hanging of his submissions to the 1868 Annual Exhibition. During the late 1860s, Moran turned his attention to genre scenes and poetic landscapes. In 1872, he moved to New York, where, possibly inspired by the example of Sanford Gifford (1823-1880) and John F. Kensett (1816-1872), he painted views of New York harbor in a Luminist manner. He also became a well-known figure in the city’s cultural life; along with his second wife, the painter Annette Parmentier (1835–1904), Moran entertained actors and writers, as well as fellow artists such as Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), Henry Ward Ranger (1858-1916), and Edwin Austin Abbey (1852-1911) and prominent art collectors, among them Samuel Putnam Avery (1822-1904).
In 1877, Moran traveled to Paris, where he is thought to have studied figure painting. While abroad, he produced a number of depictions of French peasants in the Academic Realist style of Jules Breton (1827-1906) and Jules-Bastien-Lepage (1848-1884). During the 1880s and 1890s, he devoted much of his time to a series of thirteen paintings that pictorialized the marine history of the United States, completed in 1899. A group of these paintings were exhibited at the World’s Columbian Exposition. Moran viewed the cycle as his finest work; the paintings now belong to the United States Naval Museum, Annapolis, Maryland.
