The Much Resounding Sea

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Artist: Thomas Moran (American, 1837–1926)
Medium: oil on canvas
Size: overall: 63.9 x 158.2 cm (25 3/16 x 62 5/16 in.); framed: 80 x 174 x 5.7 cm (31 1/2 x 68 1/2 x 2 1/4 in.)
Museum: National Gallery of Art
Rights: CC0 — no rights reserved

Roiling, churning waves breaking against a patch of a sandy beach fill most of this wide, horizontal landscape painting. The water deepens from aquamarine blue to teal, slate, and midnight blue amid clouds of ivory-white crests and spray. A glassy, mirror-like sheen of water coats the sandy beach where it drops sharply from the lower left corner to the breaking waves. A few shells or other objects are suggested with touches of pumpkin orange and charcoal gray along the beach.

Near the lower center, a battered wooden cage is pommeled by waves where the water meets the foot of the sloping beach. A strip of sky lightens from sable brown to our left to light tan to our right across the upper third of the composition. The artist signed and dated the work with red paint in the lower left corner, “T MORAN 1884,” with the T overlapping the M to make a monogram.