Mary Nimmo Moran

Mary Nimmo Moran

  • American, born Scotland 1842–1899

Mary Nimmo Moran was one of many artists in the Moran family. In 1860, she studied drawing and painting with her neighbor and then art teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Thomas Moran. They married two years later, and the family moved from Philadelphia to Newark in 1872. While her husband achieved fame for his paintings of the western United States, Nimmo Moran painted the landscape around her, as her responsibilities to her growing family allowed her to travel only occasionally. In 1879, when her husband took another trip to the West, he left her several prepared etching plates so that she could experiment while he was away. Working directly from nature, Nimmo Moran etched scenes of landscapes in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Long Island. Her prints garnered her great success and critical acclaim, and were collected by such figures as John Ruskin, who stated of one of them, “This is the best drawing of moving water ever seen in an etching!” She was a member of painting and etching societies in the United States, and for many years the only woman member of the Royal Society of Painters and Etchers in London; she was elected to the Society without other members’ knowledge of her gender, and a critic from the London Daily News praised her work for its masculine qualities. After visiting East Hampton for several summers, she and her husband moved there in 1884. He designed and built a house and studio at 229 Main Street, overlooking Goose Pond. They had easy access to Hook Pond, where they kept a gondola, a souvenir from Thomas’ 1890 trip to Venice. The landscape of the East End inspired both Mary and Thomas, and they became well-known through their works that depicted the scenery there. Their move to East Hampton was crucial in establishing an artists’ colony there, as many colleagues visited, and the Moran house was a cultural and intellectual center. Mary Nimmo Moran died of typhoid fever in 1899, after nursing a daughter through the disease, and was buried near Goose Pond.
[Jennifer Kruglinski]

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