Fitz Henry Lane - Stage Fort across Gloucester Harbour [1862]

Fitz Henry Lane - Stage Fort across Gloucester Harbour [1862], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Lane (1804 - 1865) returned to his native Gloucester from Boston in 1848. His works of the 1850s and 1860s are successively purged of genre and topographical elements, becoming increasingly spare and essential. By 1862, Lane had engineered a seamless, self-effacing style, possibly influenced by the works of Martin Johnson Heade. Stage Fort, once the site of military fortifications, sits on an arching land form used to lead the viewer's eye into the glowing, lucid, and almost eerily still distance. Despite the disjuncture between the virtually surreal, meticulously painted foreground and the sheer plane of water near the horizon, this work marks the transition to Lane's final, taut, elemental style. The painting's disquieting stasis, even with its hopeful pink and golden glow, creates a hermetic, elegiac mood found in many of Lane's late works.

[Oil on canvas, 96.5 x 152.4 cm]

Fitz Henry Lane - Boston Harbour, Sunset [1850-55]

Fitz Henry Lane - Boston Harbour, Sunset [1850-55], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

Fitz Henry Lane (Gloucester, Massachusetts, December 19, 1804 – Duncan's Point, Massachusetts, August 14, 1865) was an American painter and printmaker of a style that would later be called Luinism, for its use of pervasive light. Beginning in the early 1840s Lane would declare himself publicly to be a marine painter while simultaneously continuing his career as a lithographer. He quickly attained an eager and enthusiastic patronage from several of the leading merchants and mariners in Boston, New York, and his native Gloucester. Lane’s career would ultimately find him painting harbour and ship portraits, along with the occasional purely pastoral scene, up and down the eastern seaboard of the United States.

[Oil on canvas, 60.96 x 99.7 cm]