On the Moran Family’s Heady Days
(03/11/2010) For a brief period, the family of Thomas Moran was at the center of a fanciful and sparkling social whirl that included costume parties, the founding of the Maidstone Club, and floating down Hook Pond on the gondola he had brought home from Venice.
Robert Hefner discussed the highlights of the family’s private and public lives Friday night at the Clinton Academy for the East Hampton Historical Society. Mr. Hefner has been researching the history of the
 Long Island Collection, East Hampton Library
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Moran house, located across from Town Pond at 229 Main Street, and its inhabitants for the Village of East Hampton and the Thomas Moran Trust. Over the summer, his historic-structure report was presented to the village as a step in the house’s restoration — not just in appearance but in purpose — to the way it was when the family was in residence.
He detailed costume parties that were breathlessly recorded in every detail in the news accounts of the day, one of which compared the activities to “a kaleidoscopic view of the gorgeousness and brilliancy of the courts of former centuries.” The festivities were also recorded on film, sometimes days later as the family appeared to be reluctant to cede their alternate identities.
When his daughters, Ruth and Mary, were still at home and eligible for marriage, Moran’s house, known as the Studio, was a center of flamboyant parties that were no doubt encouraged by their brother, Paul, and cousins Leon and Percy, who lived nearby on the North Fork, and all of whom had an artistic bent.
The younger men in the family also provided music for the family’s various entertainments. Ruth Moran gave readings of Shakespeare for audiences at the house. Others were invited to share tales of their travels to exotic locales.
Artists of the period were also fond of creating tableaux vivants, literally living pictures that replicated famous masterpieces, sometimes down to minute detail. Mr. Hefner did not have pictorial examples of the Moran family’s tableaux, although there were written accounts. He did include some of the more devoted recreations of Velasquez paintings by William Merritt Chase’s family, neighbors and colleagues in Southampton.
The family presented its own tableau in 1891 at the Clinton Academy for one of the earlier benefits that have become such a regular summer feature over the years. Moran’s charity of choice was the Street Sprinkler Fund, which kept the grass green over the long summer months. Moran had his own pump to keep his lawn green, and it also fed Town Pond across the street. Mr. Hefner noted that while Moran may have preferred the Western landscapes he painted to be wild, “he definitely wanted a manicured setting around his home.”
Mary Nimmo Moran, known as Molly, was in charge of that setting, and is credited with designing the gardens, which are to be restored along with the house. She could often be found among them, working etching plates, which were her primary form of expression, directly from nature, an unusual and accomplished feat.
For one of her more famous plates, “The Haunt of the Muskrat,” Mr. Hefner said, she recruited some children from the neighborhood to take her out on Hook Pond in a rowboat so that she could sketch the grasses there. In a show of gratitude, she let the children take the needle to add some of the blades of grass to the composition. A first generation immigrant from Scotland, she was also known for her way with a ballad.
Moran and his wife could sometimes be seen around town sketching side by side. He was known for a strong work ethic, keeping at it most weekdays until twilight, with a break for a nap after lunch. The family would gather on the landing above the studio where he painted but would not disturb him.
While there are few of the family’s personal effects in the house, one of their most significant pieces of history also plays a major role in the village’s history. The Moran bathhouse is still on site, much as it was when it was moved to Main Beach to provide a changing area for the family. Mr. Hefner said it is the only known example of an original East Hampton bathhouse in existence, even though there are pictures from that time that show a number of similar structures lined up along the beach in the summer.
Mary married in 1895 and had her reception at the house. Molly Moran died in 1899 of the same typhoid fever that she managed to nurse Ruth through to recovery. Ruth stayed with her father, eventually following him to Santa Barbara, Calif., where he died in 1926. Ruth and her father traveled throughout the West during the last years of his life, and she became business manager for the two of them, much as her mother had been.
After Moran died, Ruth returned to East Hampton with the intention of selling the house. She instead decided to make it her home until she died in 1948. Condie and Elizabeth Lamb bought it immediately after that. It was willed to Guild Hall after Mrs. Lamb’s death in 2004. Mr. Lamb died in 1990.
Guild Hall has since transferred title of the house to the trust, which is raising money to restore it to its original state and use it for educational and interpretive purposes. The village has committed a significant amount of money to the project through the purchase of a historic preservation easement to guarantee that it remains used for these purposes.