In 1852 the young New York art critic Clarence Cook (1828–1900) made a visit to Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he had spent some time in his youth. [1] He was interested to know how the port town had changed during the four years since he had last been there, but the principal reason for his visit was to see the marine painter Fitz Henry Lane (1804–1865). Cook was already aware of Lane and was clearly an admirer. As he noted, his “name ought to be known from Maine to Georgia as the best marine painter in the country.” [2] Cook predicted Lane would find great success in the future as a marine painter: “The sea is his home; there he truly lives, and it is there, in that inexhaustible field, that his victories will be won.” [3] Cook was not mistaken; although Lane during his lifetime did not attain a fully national reputation, he and his works became known and admired in the country’s leading artistic centers in New York and New England. Ultimately, though, Lane’s reputation—like that of his fellow painter of marine subjects Martin Johnson Heade (1819–1904)—gradually waned. By the early twentieth century his name was all but forgotten outside of his native Gloucester. Interest in Lane and his art amongst historians and collectors revived in the mid-twentieth century, and the search was on to uncover facts about his life and, especially, to locate paintings by him, many of which languished unrecognized in private ownership. By the last quarter of the century Lane’s name would be found on any list of America’s most admired artists. [4]

Boston Harbor at Sunset, a superb example of Lane’s mature art, was unknown to modern scholarship on the artist until it appeared at a Boston auction in November 1996. [5] Having descended in the same private collection since it was originally acquired from the artist, Boston Harbor at Sunset was distinguished both by its high quality and beauty and for the state of its preservation. Largely unrestored and covered by an old, discolored varnish, the unlined painting survived with an undisturbed paint surface in near pristine condition. At the sale the painting was acquired for a private collection, where it has remained until the present. This essay is the first extended discussion of the importance of Boston Harbor at Sunset and its place in Fitz Henry Lane’s oeuvre.

Fitz Henry Lane, originally Nathaniel Rogers Lane, was born in the fishing port of Gloucester on December 18, 1804. [6] Although it is not known why, in 1831 he legally changed his first and middle names to become Fitz Henry Lane. [7] Partially paralyzed as a young child, possibly by infantile polio, Lane was obliged to use crutches. [8] He learned the rudiments of drawing and sketching while in his teens and in 1832 worked briefly with a lithographic firm in Gloucester. Later that year he moved to Boston for formal training in art and an apprenticeship with William S. Pendleton, owner of the city's most important lithographic firm. Lane remained with Pendleton until 1837, producing scenic views and illustrations for sheet music.

While in Boston, Lane became acquainted with the work of English-born artist Robert Salmon, the most accomplished marine painter working in the area. Salmon's paintings, with their meticulously detailed ships and crisply rendered effects of light and atmosphere, had a decisive influence on Lane's early style. By 1840 Lane had produced his first oils; two years later he was listed in a Boston almanac as a "Marine Painter." His Scene at Sea (location unknown) was exhibited at the Boston Athenaeum in 1841, and after 1845, his works were regularly shown there. During the mid-1840s Lane continued to produce both oils and lithographs, concentrating on landscapes, harbor views, and ship portraits. In 1848 he sold a painting to the American Art-Union in New York, which would subsequently purchase additional works. In the summer that same year he visited Maine with his life-long friend, Gloucester merchant Joseph Stevens, Jr., whose family had a home in Castine. Lane would make repeat visits to Maine over the rest of his life, and the distinctive scenery of the state became an important part of his artistic vocabulary. Lane settled permanently in Gloucester in 1848 and designed and constructed an impressive granite home overlooking the harbor. Although he traveled in the 1850s to such locations as Baltimore, New York, and, possibly, Puerto Rico, the scenery of New England coastal areas, especially in Maine and Massachusetts, would remain at the center of his artistic production. Lane’s success was sufficient to keep him busy painting, both on commission and on speculation, throughout his life. He remained in Gloucester until his death on August 13, 1865.

During his twenty-five-year career as a painter Lane was inconsistent in dating his works (some are dated, but many are not), which makes determining a chronology of his stylistic evolution difficult. His compositions are often comparatively crowded with vessels, figures, and other elements, but at other times they can be spare, almost reductive, with only a few such things present. The seas Lane depicted likewise vary—sometimes calm, sometimes rough—as does his treatment of light and atmosphere. None of these variations, however, are sufficiently consistent across the body of his work to allow a precise delineation between an “early,” “middle,” or “late” style. Nevertheless, one can discern in some of Lane’s harbor views beginning in the 1850s, such as Entrance to Somes Sound from Southwest Harbor (1852; private collection) and Salem Harbor (1852; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), an interest in constructing rigorously ordered compositions that heralded for his art a more powerful use of formal design. These works typically have expanses of water occupying the lower one-fourth to one-third of the canvas and running from one edge of the painting to the other, with the rest of the pictorial space given over to skies with varying types of clouds and lighting. Ships and boats, ranging in size from very large to small, are meticulously placed to achieve a sense of balanced calm and stasis. [9]

These aesthetic qualities are also evident in a number of paintings from a series by Lane depicting Boston harbor that presumably dates from the middle years of the decade. [10] Included are several paintings that are today regarded as among Lane’s most accomplished, such as Boston Harbor at Sunset (c. 1850–55; Los Angeles County Museum of Art), Boston Harbor (c. 1850; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), and Boston Harbor (1859; Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas). The present painting is a worthy and important addition to that body of work. Massachusetts was at the height of its maritime power in the 1850s and Boston’s harbor was unquestionably the state’s foremost and busiest port. [11] Most of Lane’s images have a vantage point some distance offshore in the harbor looking west, often with the sun placed low above the horizon. The buildings of Boston—dominated by Charles Bulfinch’s Massachusetts State House at the top of Beacon Hill (completed in 1798), with its distinctive dome—form a backdrop in the distance. The water in these paintings tends to be relatively calm, with only small waves animating its surface, and the number and types of ships and boats depicted vary considerably. In the canvases that relate most closely to the present painting Lane devoted particular attention to the disposition of the cloud formations and to the rendering of the colors of the sky, resulting in especially lovely effects. [12] The disc of the sun, slightly obscured by haze, is prominent in Boston Harbor at Sunset, as it sometimes is in other Lane paintings such as Castine Harbor and Town of 1851 (Timken Museum of Art, San Diego).

In Boston Harbor at Sunset some thirteen distinct vessels both large and small are distributed across the picture’s foreground and middle distance. [13] Their presence evinces the busy character of the harbor, the diverse types of vessels that frequented it, and the scope of its commercial interests and activities, which were sustained by a vigorous local, coastal, and transoceanic trade. The three most prominent ships anchoring the center of the composition are, moving from right to left: a topsail schooner of a type commonly found plying the waters of the Atlantic coast and carrying a variety of cargo (in this case lumber, very likely from Maine); a packet ship, and at the left, a large merchant ship. A small transom-sterned boat, with double masts being rowed near the bottom center of the painting helps draw the viewer’s eye into the composition. At right the bow of a ship partially cropped by the painting’s edge points out of pictorial space and establishes a visual contrast to the motion of the small boat and the large ship.

In Boston Harbor at Sunset Lane depicted the large merchant ship with none of the numerous sails it typically would have had raised; nor are there any visible furled on the yardarms or otherwise stowed. An American flag flies above the vessel’s stern, but it droops loosely, indicating an absence of wind. It is unusual in Lane’s art generally, and in the Boston harbor series particularly, to see such a prominently placed ship with no sails present. Here the merchant ship normally pushed by the wind is towed by a side-wheeled steamboat, its prominent black stack pouring sooty smoke into the sky. Steam-powered tow and tugboats were certainly present in Boston in the decade before the Civil War, although they were less common than in New York’s larger harbor. On the one hand, then, the presence of the tow boat may be seen as merely indicative of the busy everyday reality of Boston’s working harbor. But Lane’s rather emphatic visual pairing of the sail-less merchant ship with the chugging steamboat also reminds us that this was an era of transition, when the great age of sail was yielding to new technologies of mechanized transport that would revolutionize marine travel. Similar juxtapositions occur in numerous other paintings by Lane, where he often depicted both sail and steam driven vessels. But in none of his other works is the contrast asserted more prominently than here, or with such telling poignancy. In Boston Harbor at Sunset the large ship is literally powerless; it must depend on the tow boat in order to move at all. More than a few of Lane’s contemporaries would surely have recognized the allusion—almost certainly intentional on his part—to The Fighting Temeraire, tugged to her last birth to be broken up (1838; National Gallery of Art, London) the most famous work of England’s greatest marine painter, J.M.W. Turner. [14] Turner’s painting, depicting the decommissioned hulk of the famous warship that had served with Admiral Horatio Nelson’s fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar, shows the ship at sunset being pulled by a side-wheeled steamboat very like the one in Lane’s Boston Harbor at Sunset. Turner’s image, of course, was understood by his audience as referencing the glories of British empire but also as cautioning that its days of supremacy through naval power were, at best, fleeting. The time when great ships of the line like the Temeraire could rule the seas was fading as the new era of mechanized power dawned.

Lane’s Boston Harbor at Sunset, although not informed by similarly pointed historical moralizing, nonetheless addresses the reality of momentous changes that were increasingly at work in mid-nineteenth century America. Like the steam train—famously dubbed “the machine in the garden” by historian Leo Marx in his book of the same title—steamships were for Lane, just as they would be for Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), harbingers of a new age dawning and an old one passing. [15] Still, it is a testament to the elegance of Lane’s aesthetic that works such as Boston Harbor at Sunset are best understood and appreciated as perfectly expressed visions of a world of calm and peaceful order and, ultimately, great beauty.

— Franklin Kelly

[1] See William H. Gerdts, “‘The Sea is His Home’: Clarence Cook Visits Fitz Hugh [sic] Lane,” The American Art Journal 17, Summer 1985, 47.

[2] “Letters on Art.—No. IV,” The Independent, September 7, 1852, 281; quoted in Gerdts, “‘The Sea is His Home,” 47.

[3] Gerdts, “The Sea is His Home,” 49.

[4] The revival of interest in Lane was driven by a number of factors, not the least of which was his superb ability as a highly accurate visual chronicler of the vessels and marine activities of his era; see Erik A.R. Ronnberg, Jr., “Imagery and Types of Vessels,” John Wilmerding, Paintings by Fitz Hugh [sic] Lane (Washington, D.C., 1988), 61–104. Yet it was also the case that some art historians saw much of his work, along with that of Heade and a few others, as stylistically distinct from the typical creations of his contemporaries in what would become known as the Hudson River School. Lane’s carefully balanced, calmly ordered, and often evocatively quiet compositions, with their elegantly beautiful effects of light and atmosphere, were seen as exemplifying a so-called “luminist” aesthetic in American painting of the 1850s and 1860s. For historian Barbara Novak, the most eloquent advocate for luminism, he was “a paradigm” of the style. In her important book American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism and the American Experience (New York, 1969) she devoted an entire chapter to Lane, just as she did for more familiar figures such as Asher B. Durand, Thomas Cole, William Sidney Mount, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Eakins. Lane was also one of the featured artists in John Wilmerding’s landmark exhibition, American Light: The Luminist Movement, 1850–1875 held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1980 (a detail of his Approaching Storm, Owl’s Head of 1860 [private collection] was the cover of the exhibition’s catalogue). Whether or not “luminism” is, in fact, a legitimate term has been much debated. Most historians of American art today avoid using it and see the stylistic elements that once defined it separately as properly accommodated within the broader aesthetics of the Hudson River School.

[5] See American and European Paintings, Skinner, Inc., Boston, sale 1746, November 22, 1996, no. 83. A color detail of the left side of the painting served as the cover for the auction’s catalogue.

[6] On Lane see John Wilmerding, Fitz Hugh [sic] Lane (New York, 1971; reprinted as Fitz Henry Lane [Gloucester and Danvers, Masachusetts, 2005]); and Wilmerding, Paintings by Fitz Hugh [sic] Lane. The most recent extended discussion is Margaretta Markle Lovell’s important Painting the Inhabited Landscape: Fitz H. Lane and the Global Reach of Antebellum America (University Park, Pennsylvania, 2023), which proposes a new contextual understanding of the artist and his paintings that eschews the formal analysis and attendant interpretative strategies that strongly informed most previous scholarship. For additional useful information also see the website Fitz Henry Lane Online (www.fitzhenrylaneonline.org) maintained by the Cape Ann Museum.

[7] For most of his life Lane was referred to as “Fitz H. Lane” and usually signed his paintings in that manner. At some point, probably in the late 1930s and for unknown reasons, his name began to appear as Fitz Hugh Lane; that error would persist until it was corrected by researchers in the early twenty-first century; see Sarah Dunlap and Stephanie Buck, “Fitz Who? The Artist Latterly Known as Fitz Hugh Lane,” in Appendix in Wilmerding, Fitz Henry Lane, no page numbers.

[8] It has sometimes been suggested that Lane’s lack of mobility greatly limited his access to many places where he might have found subjects, but recent scholarship has argued that his strength and agility may have improved as he grew older. Although it is true he was not able to make the kind of extended forays into rugged wilderness areas that contemporaries such as Frederic Edwin Church often undertook, Lane was able to make trips along the Maine coast, take “strenuous walks,” and engage in “numerous social activities;” see Sarah Dunlap and Stephanie Buck, Lane: Family and Friends, (Gloucester, MA 2007) 120.

[9] For Entrance to Somes Sound, see Fitz Henry Lane Online, inventory no. 260. I have argued that Lane’s decision to introduce such elements of design was certainly a conscious and deliberate one; see Franklin Kelly, “Lane and Church in Maine,” in Wilmerding, Paintings by Fitz Hugh [sic] Lane, 142–144.

[10] On these paintings see Earl A. Powell, III, “The Boston Harbor Pictures,” in Wilmerding, Paintings by Fitz Hugh [sic] Lane, 47–59. Lane is believed to have painted as many as twenty works depicting the harbor. These cannot, however, be said to have constituted a series in the same sense as, for example, Claude Monet’s images of Rouen Cathedral, where the artist’s purpose was to investigate one unchanging motif under differing conditions of light and weather.

[11] As maritime historian Samuel Eliot Morison has written: “Throughout the clipper-ship era, nearly all the traditional lines of maritime commerce continued to expand and new ones were created…the commercial prosperity of Boston, in 1857, reached its high-water mark for the ante-bellum period.” See The Maritime History of Massachusetts (Boston 1961), 366; quoted in, Powell, “The Boston Harbor Pictures,” 47.

[12] Boston Harbor at Sunset also merits comparison with a similarly titled painting of 1853 now in a private collection (see Fitz Henry Lane Online, inventory no. 393).

[13] Lane was greatly admired for the accuracy of his depictions of various types of watercraft and for his knowledge of the characteristics and specific details that distinguished each. As Clarence Cook observed: “His pictures early delighted sailors by their perfect truth. Lane knows the name and place of every rope on a vessel; he knows the construction, the anatomy, the expression—and to a seaman every thing [sic] that sails has expression and individuality—he knows how she will stand under this rig, before this wind; how she looks seen stern foremost, to windward, to leeward, in all changes and guises…[he is] master of his detail….” See “The Sea is His Home,” 48–49 and Erik A. R. Ronnberg, Jr., “Imagery and Types of Vessels,” Wilmerding, “Paintings by Fitz Hugh [sic] Lane,” 61–104.

[14] Turner’s works—including the Temeraire—were extremely well known in America by the 1850s, primarily through prints after them, but also through painted copies (Robert Salmon, for example, brought his copy of Turner’s The Wreck of a Transport Ship [1810, Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon] with him when he relocated to Boston from England in 1829); see Franklin Kelly, “Turner and America,” in Ian Warrell, ed., J. M. W. Turner [exh. cat., Tate Britain and National Gallery of Art] (London 2009), 231–246. I have previously proposed a possible relationship between Turner’s Temeraire and another painting by Lane, Twilight on the Kennebec (1849, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA), where a beached sailing vessel is juxtaposed with a large steam-powered vessel moving through the water in the distance; see “Lane and Church in Maine,” 134.

[15] Ironically, side-wheeled steam tugs and tow boats were themselves destined to fade from the scene as they were superseded by propeller-driven vessels.