Thomas Moran: The Bolton Engraver Whose Yellowstone Art Swayed Congress

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Thomas Moran was born in 1837 in Bolton, England, a mill town where his father worked as a hand loom weaver. In 1844, with industrialization displacing that work, the family of seven children moved to the United States and settled near Philadelphia. As a teenager Moran apprenticed at the wood engraving firm Scattergood and Telfer, carving blocks in reverse while painting watercolors in his spare time. Illustrated books of J.M.W. Turner captivated him, and in 1862 he traveled to England to study Turner's work in person. His wife, Mary Nimmo Moran, was an accomplished painter and etcher, and his brothers Edward, Peter and John were artists too; John, a pioneering photographer, often shot the scenes Thomas painted. By the late 1860s Moran was chief illustrator for Scribner's Monthly.

In 1871 financier Jay Cooke of the Northern Pacific Railroad helped fund Moran's place on Ferdinand Hayden's survey of Yellowstone. Over 40 days on horseback he sketched more than 30 sites alongside photographer William Henry Jackson. Their images helped persuade Congress and President Ulysses S. Grant to make Yellowstone the first national park in 1872, and the government bought his Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone for $10,000. He began signing his work TYM, Thomas Yellowstone Moran. Returning in 1892 for the World's Columbian Exposition, he arrived by train, stayed in a hotel at Mammoth Hot Springs, and found crowds of tourists. He died in Santa Barbara in 1926 at 89.

• Engraving, and later etching and lithography learned from his brothers, taught him to make images built for mass reproduction.
• He saw photography as recording a scene's physical facts and painting as recording its emotional reality.
• On the 1892 trip he sketched from a viewpoint already named Moran Point.
• Mount Moran in Grand Teton National Park is named for him, and his East Hampton home is a national historic landmark.
• His 1895 painting The Three Tetons hung in the Oval Office during Barack Obama's presidency.