Catalog entry

Commentary

This painting—not dated but probably made in 1856—is based on a pencil drawing by Lane, dated September 1855 by Joseph Stevens, who was with Lane and Joseph S. Hooper when the drawing was made. Their boat was anchored north-northwest of, and about half a mile distant from, Owl’s Head lighthouse. At this location, the lightkeeper’s house and the boat shed at the shore are aligned, while Monroe Island and Muscle Ridge Channel are hidden by Owl’s Head Point.

The vessels in this painting reflect the variety of shipping and commerce drawn to the Casco Bay region. Portland—Maine’s principal shipping port—dominated the state’s coastal and foreign trades, passenger transportation, and fishing industry. These are represented by a coastal passenger steamer (background), a merchant (full-rigged) ship (left middle ground), a coasting sloop with a deck load of firewood (far left), and a small fishing schooner (far right). (1)

While railroads increasingly encroached on coastal steamship service between Boston and Portland, Maine’s jagged coastline north of Portland had a multitude of harbors and coastal settlements too small and remote to warrant rail service. This kept coastal packets—steam and sail—busy for the rest of the nineteenth century and beyond, succumbing to automobiles and paved highways in the twentieth century. (2)

Deep-water shipping—large vessels, sail and steam, foreign and domestic—came to Portland as the distribution point for goods destined for Maine communities via rail (interior) and packets (coastal). These ships brought household wares, luxury goods, and materials needed for domestic building and manufacturing enterprises. (3)

Coastal trade was carried on in vessels ranging from sloops (like the one in this painting) to schooners and brigs, as well as steamships. Lumber was the most significant product carried by coasting vessels under sail to southern New England ports and beyond. Firewood, a by-product of the lumber industry, found a ready market in coastal ports, including Portland, where the sloop in this painting is probably bound. Hay—marsh hay and farm hay—was shipped in large quantities to Boston for feeding and bedding the thousands of horses used for business there. (4)

The fishing industry was dominated by Maine in the quarter century preceding the Civil War, and Portland was its center of distribution of fish to neighboring states and to the West Indies. This primacy lasted until the adoption of new fishing methods (dory trawling, mackerel seining), which Maine fishermen could not afford, and a combination of fishery-oriented reforms (insurance, finance, charitable aid) in Gloucester that helped that city regain leadership. The small hand-line fishing schooner depicted by Lane symbolizes the then-dominant Maine fishing industry and the reason for its eventual decline. (5)

Without any pretension to foresight, Lane has left us with an image of Maine’s maritime industry that warrants deeper thought than the individual vessels it portrays.

– Erik Ronnberg

References:

1. Robert G. Albion, William A. Baker, Benjamin W. Labaree, New England and The Sea (Mystic, CT: Marine Historical Association, 1972), pp. 127, 128.

2. Ibid., p. 120.

3. Ibid., p. 121.

4. Ibid., pp. 124 – 127. William Hutchinson Rowe, The Maritime History of Maine (New York: W. W. Norton & Co.,  1948), pp. 250 – 253. George S. Wasson, Sailing Days on the Penobscot (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1949), pp. 56 – 78.

5. Wayne M. O’Leary, Maine Sea Fisheries (Boston, MA: North Eastern University Press, 1996), pp. 241 – 246, 160 – 179.

Related Work in the Catalog

Supplementary Images

Proposed viewpoint of Lane when he created the picture. Viewpoint plottings by Erik Ronnberg using t... [more]he 1875 U.S. Coast Survey chart of Mount Desert Island.