Thomas Moran

(1837-1926)

Seminole Village in the Everglades 1860 (Seminole Indians Encamped in a Clearing in a Florida Swamp) 15 x 11 1/2in (38.1 x 29.2cm)

Footnotes

Provenance
Kennedy Galleries, Inc., New York, by 1964.
Walter Beinecke, acquired from the above, 1965.
By descent to the present owner.

Literature
Kennedy Galleries, Inc., The Kennedy Quarterly, New York, 1964, illustrated.

This work will be included in Phyllis Braff's, Stephen L. Good's, and Melissa Webster Speidel's forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's work.

Celebrated for his grand landscape paintings of the great American West, Thomas Moran also painted spectacular views in Europe, Mexico, and along the East Coast of the United States. A relatively rare body of work admired from Moran's oeuvre are those that he painted while traveling through Florida. Moran's Seminole Village in the Everglades 1860 (Seminole Indians Encamped in a Clearing in a Florida Swamp) is one of his earliest depictions of the Florida landscape and a notable scene depicting the Seminole people in their environs of the Everglades.

Born in Bolton, England, in 1832, to Mary and Thomas Moran Sr., the artist's origins in Europe were short lived. Forced out of the country due to widespread poverty and near famine in Bolton, Thomas Moran Sr. arrived in America in 1842, followed by his wife and seven children in 1844. In the years that followed, the Moran children prospered. Thomas' older brother Edward Moran (1829-1901) became a successful artist in his own right, exhibiting four paintings at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1854, paving the way for young Thomas to begin his own artistic studies. Beginning in 1853, Thomas worked as an engraver for Scattergood and Telfer in Philadelphia and started his studies under Paul Gottlieb Weber (1823-1916) and James Hamilton (1819-1878), two men who would later be regarded by Moran as fundamental mentors to his development as an artist. (N.K. Anderson, Thomas Moran, Washington, D.C., 1997, p. 25) By 1860, Moran's abilities as a narrative landscape painter had developed immensely under the instruction of Weber and Hamilton and would further blossom after traveling to England with his brother Edward to study firsthand the work of J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851).

In the present work, Moran beautifully depicts in detail the biodiversity of the Everglades, from the tall palm trees that tower over the landscape to the blue, pink, red, and white southern wildflowers that are entwined with the thick vegetation in the foreground. Enveloped in this foliage, a lone Seminole figure sits outside a tent. Moran has cleverly spotlighted the encampment with sunlight that breaks through the trees overhead. In 1860 when Moran painted the present work, few Seminoles remained in Florida. Most of the population had been pushed out as a result of the Seminole Wars that spanned the first half of the 19th century and wreaked havoc on their way of life. Whether Moran's narrative is intended to comment on these wars is unsure, but the isolation of those that remained in the region is felt through his poetic, meticulous rendering of a landscape seemingly trapped in time.

Moran would revisit the subject of Florida's landscape numerous times throughout his career and Native American tribes would become a recurring motif in his work, especially in his depictions of the American West. The present work is an early and remarkably striking example of Moran's interest in Florida, a subject that he returned to later in works such as Fort George Island, Florida (1878, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.) and Ponce de León in Florida (1877-78, Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens, Jacksonville, Florida).