Catalog entry

Commentary

This surprisingly small drawing of Boston’s skyline, as viewed from Governor’s Island looking westward, appears to be the basis for the skylines in several paintings post-dating 1853. Those works include Boston Harbor, c.1850 (inv. 48), Boston Harbor, 1856 (inv. 203), Boston Harbor, Sunset, 1850–55 (inv. 242), Boston Harbor (not published) and Boston Harbor, 1854 (inv. 341), all of them showing the steeple of the First Baptist Church (to the right of the State House) which was completed in 1853. In its present state, the drawing is made up of two sheets, lapped and glued, with register (X) marks which suggest that the parts were drawn separately and joined later. There is also a single register (X) mark on the upper right margin, but no other physical evidence that a third sheet was linked in some way.

Lane’s viewing point – Governor’s Island – was determined from analyses of charts of Boston Harbor published by the U.S. Coast Survey. Locations and identities of prominent buildings in the drawing were established from a street map in an 1847 edition of “The Boston Almanac and Directory” and transferred to the street plan in the Coast Survey chart. Their relative locations on the skyline were projected from the viewing point on Governor’s Island to a base line at the margin of the chart (see below, left margin). (1)  

             

The base line with its building locations was then scaled to match the width of the drawing and the intercept mark for each building was labeled. Locations of corresponding buildings were  then marked (in red) to show how closely they agreed with the chart (see below). It should be noted that the U.S. Coast Survey used the finest (i.e. European-made) surveying equipment of the period, with many of its cartographers recruited from European surveying and mapmaking firms and agencies. The resulting charts were equal in accuracy to comparable examples from Europe. (2)                                                            

 

Comparison of Lane’s drawing with projections of specific building locations from the U.S. Coast Survey’s 1857 chart of Boston Harbor are in close, if not perfect, agreement, suggesting the use of a viewing aid which was probably fitted with grid lines. The recto sheet was very close for most buildings; the verso sheet had only two locations to compare, and both were almost identical in degree, suggesting that its part of the skyline was viewed separately with slight misjudgement of where the two sheets were to be joined.

The drawing in its present state indicates that it either had a third section showing Boston’s North End and parts of Charles Town and East Boston, or it was an up-dated part of an older drawing, but never joined to it permanently. The skyline in Boston Harbor (not published), which includes this missing part of Boston Harbor, suggests that Lane drew a far broader view of Boston Harbor than what has survived.

–Erik Ronnberg

References:

1. “The Boston Almanac for the Year 1843” (Boston, MA: S.N. Dickinson, 1843), pp. 66–126 (general listing of churches).

 “The Boston Almanac for the Year 1854” (Boston, MA: Damrell & Moore, and George Coolidge, 1854), pp. 56, 57 (First Baptist Church).

2. Alex Krieger and David Cobb, with Amy Turner, “Mapping Boston” (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 62–64, 112. 

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