This was a quality that Moran and other American landscape painters borrowed directly from European predecessors of the eighteenth century, such as the dramatic painter Caspar David Friedrich.

The Grand Canyon and other landmarks of the American West appear so vast and alien in his work that they seem somehow impervious to the scales of human experience and emotion. Moran's work exemplifies the quality of the Sublime in art, whereby grand natural spectacles - or sometimes manmade ones - generate a sense of terror and awe in the viewer.The combined qualities of Sublimity and apparent rootedness in human emotion that define Moran's best canvases - less glossy and overdone than some of his contemporaries' - arguably position him as Turner's most important North-American protégé. But perhaps no North-American landscape painter of the nineteenth century inherited the mantle of Turner's rugged magnificence like Moran.

J.M.W Turner's work was an exemplar to many of Moran's contemporaries.

Indeed, in the case of Bierstadt, Keith, and the English-born Moran, combined European and American identity perhaps enhanced the Northern-European Romantic aesthetic underlying their work. A direct thread can be traced back from their work to the adapted European- Romantic aesthetic of Cole et al. Though not a 'school' in any conventional sense, he was one of a number of artists (including Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Hill, and William Keith) who developed the aesthetic of the East Coast-based Hudson River painters by depicting the vaster, more rugged terrains of the American West.

Thomas Moran is often said to form part of the Rocky Mountain School.

Anja the Liar by Thomas Moran