Existing comment:
While still a teenager Thomas became an apprentice at the Philadelphia engraving firm of Scattergood and Telfer. After three years he withdrew from his apprenticeship and began working in the studio of his older brother, Edward, who had begun to establish himself as a marine painter. Serving, in effect, a second apprenticeship, Moran benefitted not only from the advice of his brother but also from that of James Hamilton (1819-1878), a well-known Philadelphia painter who had befriended Edward. Described by contemporaries as the "American Turner," Hamilton may have sparked Thomas Moran's life-long interest in the work of English artist J.M.W. Turner.
In 1861, after several years of studying Turner's work in reproduction, Thomas and Edward journeyed to London where they spent several months studying and copying Turner's work at the National Gallery. A decade later, when Thomas journeyed west to join Ferdinand Vandiver Hayden's expedition to Yellowstone, the watercolors he produced on site bore clear evidence of his debt to Turner. |