?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 10,000 - $ 15,000
MARY NIMMO MORAN Long Island Landscape.
Oil on panel, 1880. 500x760 mm; 19 3/4x30 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower left recto.
Born in Scotland, Mary Nimmo (1842-1899) moved with her family to Pennsylvania, settling in northeast Philadelphia in the mid-1800s. In Philadelphia, the Nimmos were neighbors with the Moran family of artists. In 1862, Mary married landscape painter Thomas Moran.
Mary learned to draw and paint from Thomas and by the 1870s was exhibiting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Around this time, with money that Thomas had earned from the sale of two of his paintings of the American West (purchased by the US Congress for the then unheard of sum of $10,000 each), the couple bought a home in Newark, New Jersey. Mary made numerous paintings of the surrounding New Jersey countryside, ran a drawing school and managed her husband's burgeoning career.
The Moran's relocated to New York in the early 1800s and in 1884 completed building a studio-cottage in East Hampton, Long Island. Mary Moran became a proficient etcher and made numerous prints and paintings of Long Island. In 1898-99, while caring for soldiers returning from the Spanish American War in Cuba, at a military camp constructed in nearby Montauk, she became ill and died in 1899 following a bout with typhoid fever.
