Peter Moran, A Burro Train, New Mexico, 1880

This artwork titled “A Burro Train, New Mexico” 1880 is an original etching on Laid paper by noted British/American artist Peter Moran, 1841-1914. It is signed in the plate as issue. The plate mark (Image) size is 9.15 x 6.5 inches, framed size is 14.75 x 18.75 inches. It is framed in a wooden silver frame, with light grey matting. It is in excellent condition, especially considering the age. I like to mention that example of this particular etching is held in the following museums, including, The Toledo Museum Of Art, Toledo, The British Museum, London and The Smithsonian Museum Of Art, Washington D.C. It was also illustrated in American Art Review, volume #2 1881, page 163.

About the artist:

The younger brother of Thomas Moran, Peter Moran was a painter-etcher best known for his Romantic sensibility and landscape compositions incorporating animals. The Moran family immigrated to the United States from England in 1844, when Peter was three. He began his artistic career as an apprentice to a lithographic firm and eventually studied painting with his brothers Edward and Thomas. He was influenced by the animal paintings of Rosa Bonheur and Constant Troyon and visited England in 1863 to see those of Edwin Landseer.

Moran took up etching in 1874, using that medium to record genre scenes that he observed while traveling in New Mexico and Arizona in 1881 on an ethnographic expedition to study Pueblo Indian culture. He later returned to the Southwest in 1890 as an artist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

In 1882, Moran joined Henry R. Poore, an artist friend, on a visit to Taos Pueblo where the two were given a room and spent a week watching the activities associated with the harvest. Poore recounted the details of their travels in an article titled “A Harvest with the Taos Indians,” published in 1883.

Peter Moran appears to have been the first American artist to make etchings of New Mexico subjects. Moran eventually gained a reputation in his day of “having been the first among the artists to recognize the picturesque qualities of the scenery of the southwest,” according to a book published in 1883, and of capitalizing on “all the glaring sunlight, all the romance of wild life,” in the “tablelands and in the cañons of New Mexico.”Continue Reading