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This canvas is perhaps the only panoramic underwater scene in 19^th-century American art, and it is the aquatic equivalent of a Hudson River School landscape.

Moran may have been inspired by underwater exploration related to the laying of the first successful telegraph cable in 1858.

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Edward Moran

The Valley of the Sea, 1862

oil on canvas

40 ½ x 64 in.

Martha Delzell Memorial Fund

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Born in England, Edward Moran immigrated to Maryland in 1844 where his father was a hand loom weaver.  One of twelve children, Moran left home to work in a cotton factory in Philadelphia where he did large sketches.  He was encouraged to pursue art as a career, and he and his brother Thomas studied and shared a studio in Philadelphia before returning to England to continue their studies.  Edward Moran is best known for his marine paintings.  His style was influenced by J. M. W. Turner’s seascapes and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch painting.  He became known for his silvery tones and loose accents of light, along with dramatic, bright green-blue turbulent seas and brilliant skies. Although his brother Thomas Moran is the more famous of the two in American art history, Edward Moran was unequalled during his time as a marine painter.

The Valley of the Sea is the first and perhaps only panoramic underwater view in nineteenth-century American art. Painted in Philadelphia, its majestic distant spaces and meticulous attention to details reveals the aquatic equivalent of the scenic wonders that fascinated the painters of the Hudson River School.  It is most likely that Dr. James M. Sommerville, the original owner of Valley of the Sea, commissioned Edward Moran to create this painting. In 1859 Sommerville published Ocean Life, which included illustrations of 75 different species of aquatic life and in 1860 Matthew Fontaine Maury published the Physical Geography of the Sea and Its Meteorology, the first textbook on modern oceanography.  There is a marked similarity between some of Maury’s descriptions and Moran’s paintings. A 1971 letter from Jacques Cousteau stated, “Ed Moran’s painting … is a work of imagination, based on serious documentation.”   

Reference

Tom Thomas.  Marine Paintings: Edward Moran-Master Painter, CreateSpace, 2009. ISBN-13: 978-1442116719

James M. Sommerville. Ocean Life, Stockholm: Tryckt hos A. L. Norman, reprinted 2009. ASIN: B002FC3YYU