Painter, etcher, engraver, and lithographer, Thomas Moran was born in Bolton, Lancashire, England on 12 February 1837. His family sailed from England to America in 1844 and Thomas was destined to become one of America’s greatest landscape painters. He showed an early affinity toward art and at the age of fifteen-years-old was apprenticed to a wood-engraver in Philadelphia.

In 1856, Thomas and his brother Edward rented a studio in Philadelphia to study and apply their craft full time. Deeply influenced by the painter J.M.W. Turner whose work he had studied on two trips to England, Thomas Moran was determined to capture the way things look, including the effects of atmosphere and light on color and form. He also stood at the beginning of the conservationist movement in the American West. His first painting of Yellowstone was instrumental in the creation of the first U.S. National Park, Yellowstone National Park. Even though he was a member of the Hudson River School in New York, the West dominated most of his work and the subject which he returned most frequently was the Grand Canyon.

Moran was a member of the American Water Color Society, the Century Association, the Lotos Club, the New York Etching Club, the Painters of the West, the Society of Painters Etchers (London), and was an Academician of the National Academy of Design.

He lived in Newark, New Jersey and New York City before building a home in 1884 on East Hampton, Long Island. In 1916, Thomas Moran moved to Santa Barbara, California where he died on 26 August 1926.