'John Moore showed some discontent with the prevailing outlook in Australian landscape painting soon after his return from Europe after the war ... [he] showed an unusually strong interest in nature in its more dramatic moods ... a weariness with perpetual sunshine and the unchanging mood which was thought to be proper to the typical Australian landscape.'
- Basil Burdett, 1933

Although practising as an architect, Moore also maintained his career as a painter. Like his fellow artists in the Contemporary Group founded by George Lambert and Thea Proctor, he contributed to the development of the modern movement in Sydney through an approach which emphasised formal construction. Using the framework of architecture, Moore's view of 'Sydney Harbour' was taken from the balcony of his house in the eastern Sydney suburb of Vaucluse. His well-regarded landscapes, more often in the medium of watercolour, arose from a love of sketching out-of-doors and for the watercolours of English artists John Sell Cotman, Constable, James Innes and Wilson Steer.