A leading figure of the Luminist movement, an extension of the Hudson River School, Fitz Henry Lane was devoted to capturing light and atmospheric effects in marine painting. Little is known of Lane's biography; he was largely self-taught and also studied with English-born marine painter Robert Salmon, who is credited with founding the Luminist movement. Lane enjoyed local celebrity in Boston during his lifetime, and his death was regarded as a national loss. Nineteenth-century American art scholar Barbara Novak described his work as "perhaps the closest parallel to Emerson's Transcendentalism that America produced: of all painters of the mid-century, he was the most 'transparent eyeball,'" referring to his intuitive ability to experience nature. [1] Celebrating the rugged beauty of the Maine coast, Christmas Cove hints at deeper meaning in the image of a schooner at rest, the end of day as metaphor for the end of life. Despite the restful elements within the composition, Lane imbued his composition with a sense of vitality and light.

In Christmas Cove, Lane employed the low horizon line he favored, filling most of the canvas with sky. The setting sunbathes the entire composition with a pink glow. Visual harmony is reinforced by a dark-to-light balance and repetition of form—three rocky formations lead the eye toward the spare silhouette of a boat at the distant center. Further balance is established by the verticality of three barren pines opposite two tall masts. Art Historian John Wilmerding observed parallels between the national trauma during the post-Civil War era and Lane's seascape imagery, noting that "their elegiac twilight reds and stark tonal contrasts coincide with the literal storm clouds and civil fires of a nation at war with itself.” [2]

Wilmerding identified Christmas Cove among several of "the most important and beautiful" Maine views based on earlier drawings and repeated visits to favorite sites of the late 1850s and 1860s, noting that these works tend to be more generalized and drawn from memory [3]. Notably, despite the painting's longstanding title, the locale is not Christmas Cove, which does not possess the island geography depicted and is unlikely the original artist's title. Instead, the painting captures another venue, or a pastiche of views, in Penobscot Bay, an area intimately familiar to the artist and home to an array of islands that Lane visited and sketched in the 1850s and early 1860s [4]. Lane traveled to Maine as early as the summer of 1848 and made numerous excursions Down East. Lane's commitment to Maine and the atmospheric effects of the sea directly link him to future generations of Maine painters, such as Winslow Homer. The present work is characteristic of Lane's most celebrated Maine subjects, done at the culmination of his successful career.

[1] Barbara Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism and the American Experience. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 89

[2] John Wilmerding, Paintings by Fitz Hugh Lane. New York: Abrams, 1988, p. 122

[3] Sam Holdsworth, "The Catalog of Paintings, Drawings, and Lithographs." Fitz Henry Lane Online. Cape Ann Museum.

[4] John Wilmerding, Paintings by Fitz Hugh Lane. New York: Abrams, 1988, p. 122