Peter Moran’s picturesque etching of a burro pack train may be based on his experiences during his third trip to New Mexico in the summer of 1882. He had made previous visits in 1880 and 1881, the latter in order to create sketches for an ethnological research project on Indian tribes in the West. 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. Upon leaving Taos, they traveled to Santa Fe and remained there for some time before returning east. The present etching shows a scene from Moran and Poore’s journey back to Santa Fe upon leaving Taos. Poore recounted the details of their travels in an article titled “A Harvest with the Taos Indians,” published in 1883.

An Englishman by birth, Peter Moran appears to have been the first American artist to make etchings of New Mexico subjects. The younger brother of Thomas Moran, Peter took up etching in 1874 in order to record genre scenes that often featured animals, the subject that he was most interested in depicting. The burros in the present work offer an excellent example of Moran’s ability to capture an animal’s physical characteristics in a lively and convincing manner. The rutted dirt road and adobe buildings are also evocative of rural New Mexico in the late-nineteenth century. 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.”

A fine, large etching by Moran of the New Mexico countryside in the late-nineteenth century.