Thomas Moran (February 12, 1837 – August 25, 1926) was an American painter and printmaker of the Hudson River School in New York whose work often featured the Rocky Mountains.

[3] Moran began his artistic career as a teenage apprentice to the Philadelphia wood-engraving firm Scattergood & Telfer.

Moran found the engraving process "tedious"[4] and spent his free time working on his own watercolors.

During the 1870s and 1880s, Moran's designs for wood-engraved illustrations appeared in major magazines and gift oriented publications.

Although he mastered multiple printing media including wood-engraving, etching, and lithography, which he learned from his brothers, he received renown for his paintings in oil and in watercolor.

The height of his career coincided with the popularity of chromolithography, which Moran used to make color prints of his works, so that they could be widely distributed.

Hayden was just about to embark on his arduous journey when he received a letter from Cooke presenting Moran as "an artist of Philadelphia of rare genius".

During forty days in the wilderness area, Moran visually documented over 30 different sites and produced a diary of the expedition's progress and daily activities.

Just one year after his introduction to the area, Moran captured the imagination of the American public with his first enormous painting of a far-western natural wonder, The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, which the government purchased in 1872 for $10,000.

Moran was elected to the membership of the National Academy of Design in 1884 and produced numerous works of art in his senior years.

In the photograph depicting President Barack Obama and Israeli President Shimon Peres in the Oval Office it is seen on the wall: the portrait of George Washington is between City of Washington from Beyond the Navy Yard (1833) by George Cooke (on the left) and The Three Tetons (1895) by Thomas Moran (on the right).