36. Mary Nimmo Moran
(1842-1899)
Scrub Oaks, Amagansett, Long Island, N.Y.

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Moran, Scrub Oaks

Scrub Oaks, Amagansett, Long Island, N.Y.

Etching, 1881, 189 x 252 mm., Klackner 22, Gilcrease Inst. 81. Very fine impression, with plate tone, on thick, brownish, laid paper with good margins, signed in pencil; a few spots of light foxing in the right margin. Mary Nimmo was Thomas Moran’s neighbor, pupil and eventually his wife. Like her husband, she was British born, in her case in Scotland. She was among the first, and certainly among the most eminent, of American women etchers and she had an artistic personality that, while influenced by her husband’s, was distinct from his. She had a real feeling for poetic country landscape, not of the sublime sort, and a real ability to draw trees and to distinguish one genus from another. Technically, she was straightforward, but no purist. The plate tone here is used as if it were a grain of aquatint, shading the sand dune and allowing the brighter sky to come beneath and through the trees.