Appreciating a unique work by artist Thomas Moran

A Closer Look: Thomas Moran’s ‘Lower Manhattan from Communipaw, New Jersey’

Written by SARAH J. HALL

Have you ever spent an hour with a single work of art? Researchers say that most museum visitors devote only 15 to 30 seconds looking at a work of art before moving on to the next one.

But slowing down and really looking is immensely rewarding.

One of the pleasures of having a free and excellent museum in your community – like the Washington County

Museum of Fine Arts – is that it’s easy to visit. You can stay 15 minutes to visit a favorite painting, or you can spend a couple of hours immersed in a special exhibition.

As you might guess, I have several favorite paintings in the museum’s collection. One that you might find me in front of frequently 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 have a monthly online program for museum members called Art Social Hour. We spend an hour looking at and discussing one artwork, and while the discussion is structured and led by a museum staff member, the purpose of the program is to get everyone talking and learning from each other. We try to break down the idea that we need experts to help us understand art. We use, what in the education field is called Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), to build from our observations of the artwork some theories and suppositions about larger ideas and meanings.

So let’s look at the Moran together right now. (Maybe you should hop in your car and head to the museum!) Take a nice long look at the image of the painting accompanying this article. I always start Art Social Hour with a full-screen image of the work under discussion and we are quiet for the first couple of minutes. Letting our eyes move through the composition. Making some mental notes about what we notice and what we think is happening. I often suggest that if you have a pencil and paper – you make a rudimentary sketch – if you try to sketch a painting, even if you don’t consider yourself skilled, the active looking required will help you better understand the composition, and you’ll notice things you might not otherwise.

What’s happening in this painting? My first answer would be — a lot! 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 labor around — 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 creating romantic effects in the sky. The placid water mir-

“Lower Manhattan from Communipaw, New Jersey” by artist Thomas Moran is one of the many pieces on display at the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts.

These close-up images from the work are just a few examples of how Moran’s expert touch brings the tiniest of details to life.

roring the sky. The masts of ships and the verticals of smokestacks creating a rhythm on the horizon. The tiny figures inviting close looking and discoveries. The paint 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.

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 color — 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) help our eye travel through the composition, as does the masterful way he makes the air and water shimmer with subtleties of silvery-gray and white. I asked the group in Art Social Hour if they thought this painting told a story, or if it was meant to be “about” something. One participant commented, “It is very real to me and think at this time it evokes the desire to build a cleaner environment.”

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, also can make us feel more alive. Moran uses that idea in his grand paintings of western landscapes, and here, in our painting, 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.

So please, next time you are in the museum, spend more than 30 seconds with Thomas Moran’s gorgeous view; he’s showing us a view from what was Communipaw Cove (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.

Sarah J. Hall is executive director of the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts at 401 Museum Drive, Hagerstown. The museum is open Tuesday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sunday, 1 to 5 p.m. Visit wcmfa.org for more information about exhibitions, classes and more.