By Sarah Hall, executive director Washington County Museum of Fine Arts

If you are traveling to New York City between now and January 12, try to make time to visit the Wallach Gallery at Columbia University and visit our Thomas Moran painting Lower Manhattan from Communipaw, New Jersey, on loan to the exhibition Shifting Shorelines: Art, Industry and Ecology along the Hudson River.

Thomas Moran (American, b. England 1837-1926).
Lower Manhattan from Communipaw, New Jersey. 1880.
Oil on canvas
Washington County Museum of Fine Arts.

As you might guess, I have a number of favorite paintings in the museum’s collection. One in particular is the sublimely beautiful Lower Manhattan from Communipaw, New Jersey by Thomas Moran. Moran is an artist whose fame rests largely on monumental canvases he created depicting the awe-inspiring terrain of the American West—most significantly, Yellowstone (although he painted Yosemite, the Grand Canyon and many other Western natural wonders as well). In the museum’s Moran, however, we aren’t looking westward, we’re looking eastward, and we’re not gob-smacked by the grandeur of the natural world, we’re instead mesmerized by the visible manifestations of the impact of man.

We’re looking across the water at a city. The skyline spreads out in the distance with clear evidence of industry. The sky is full of billowing smoke that drifts outward towards the edges of the painting.  In the foreground, to the right a group of workmen load (or unload) a barge. It’s fascinating to look at the figures engaged in work. There’s a crane. There’s an abandoned propeller. The foreground is mostly dirt, with scattered evidence of the surrounding labor—things that look like scrap metal, perhaps old rags–the refuse of an active work site. To the left, there is a different set of laborers and this group seems to be working with large quarried stones.

It bears saying, that this painting is a pleasure to look at—it’s beautiful. The billowing smoke creates romantic effects in the sky. The placid water mirrors the sky. The masts of ships and the verticals of smoke stacks create a rhythm on the horizon. The tiny figures invite close looking and discoveries. The paint is so masterfully applied that one writer described Moran’s way with paint thusly:

His touch for grass, his touch for pine trees, his touch for rocks, his touch for mud and gravel, his touch for cloud, is ready at a moment’s notice, whereupon the thing is in a moment defined. A turn of the wrist, a play of the astonished bristles [emphasis mine], and the thing is painted. 

Below are details from Thomas Moran ‘s
Lower Manhattan from Communipaw, New Jersey. 1880.
Oil on canvas
Washington County Museum of Fine Arts.

I love the idea of Moran’s ability being so consummate that the very bristles of his paintbrush are astonished!

But if we take apart the composition a bit, we might notice a few things. Moran uses little flicks of red (a rag in the foreground, the shirt of a workman at left, a vest at right, a dab along the horizon) to help our eye travel through the composition, and he masterfully makes the air and water shimmer with subtleties of silvery-gray and white.

So how is it that a painting about industry, about pollution, about man scarring the landscape (and indeed being oblivious, as are the figures in this painting who go about their own personal industry without paying any attention to the “big picture”) is so beautiful? And beautiful in the opposite way to the artist’s Western views, which show the unspoiled grandeur of nature.

One big art historical idea comes into play here—the notion of the sublime. There’s a certain kind of beauty and a bit of a thrill that comes from the experiences in life that strike awe in us—experiences that make us feel small and fragile but can also make us feel more alive. Moran uses that idea in his grand paintings of Western landscapes, and here, in our painting, he shows us that the works of man can evoke the same mixed feelings.

Moran boasted a powerful visual memory—for color, texture, form—but he knew that the experience of landscape was as much about subjective feeling as it was about accuracy. His gift, then, is not just with his facile brush, but in his ability to absorb the feeling of a place and then conjure that for us. It’s a kind of magic.

Moran is showing us a view from what was Communipaw Cove in New Jersey (now filled in and part of Liberty State Park) across the water to sugar refineries belching smoke in Manhattan—but he’s also showing us the world we’ve made, in all its complicated ambiguity—every bit of it is beautiful, from the discarded rag and struggling flowers, to the sky hung with smoke, to the placid, glassy water.