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Fitz Henry Lane
HISTORICAL ARCHIVE • CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ • EDUCATIONAL RESOURCE
An online project under the direction of the CAPE ANN MUSEUM
An online project under the direction of the CAPE ANN MUSEUM
Catalog entry
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inv. 81
Off Mount Desert Island
1856 Oil on canvas 24 x 35 1/16 in. (61 x 89.1 cm) Signed and dated lower left: F H Lane 1856
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Provenance (Information known to date; research ongoing.)
Charles D. Childs, Boston, Mass., 1947
Harry Shaw Newman, New York, 1947
Richard Charles Morrison, Boston
Brooklyn Museum, N.Y., 1947
Exhibition History
Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York, The Coast and the Sea: A Survey of American Marine Painting, November 19, 1948–January 16, 1949.
American Federation of Arts, New York, New York, American Paintings in the Nineteenth Century, 1953.
M. Knoedler & Co., New York, New York, American Panorama: An Exhibition of Paintings from the Brooklyn Museum Collection, April 8–30, 1954., no. 24.
Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio, Rediscoveries in American Painting, October 3–November 6, 1955.
DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts, Fitz Hugh Lane: The First Major Exhibition, March 20–April 17, 1966., no. 44.
Traveled to: Colby College Art Museum, Waterville, Maine, 30–6, 1966.
Traveled to: Colby College Art Museum, Waterville, Maine, 30–6, 1966.
National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, District of Columbia, National Parks and the American Landscape, June 23–August 27, 1972., no. 6.
Davis & Long Co., New York, New York, Masterpieces of American Painting from the Brooklyn Museum, April 30–May 29, 1976., no. 9.
National Museum, Stockholm, Sweden, A New World: American Landscape Painting, 1893–1900, September 18–November 23, 1986., no. 66.
Traveled to: Goteborgs Konstmuseum, Gothenburg, Sweden, 6, 1986–15, 1987.
Traveled to: Goteborgs Konstmuseum, Gothenburg, Sweden, 6, 1986–15, 1987.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia, Paintings by Fitz Hugh Lane, May 15–September 5, 1988., no. 46, ill. in color, p. 158.
Traveled to: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Mass., 5–31, 1988.
Traveled to: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Mass., 5–31, 1988.
Jordan-Volpe Gallery, New York, New York, Masterpieces of American Painting from the Brooklyn Museum, October 17–December 7, 1996., no. 66.
Osterreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna, Austria, America: The New World in 19th-Century Painting, March 17–June 20, 1999., no. 35.
Museo Thyssen- Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain, Explorar el Eden: Paisaje Americano del siglo XIX, September 29, 2000–January 14, 2001., p. 128.
Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom, American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820–1880, February 20–May 19, 2002., p. 254.
Traveled to: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pa., 17–25, 2002; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, Minn., 22–17, 2002.
Traveled to: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pa., 17–25, 2002; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, Minn., 22–17, 2002.
Published References
McCormick, Gene E. "Fitz Hugh Lane, Gloucester Artist, 1804–1865." Art Quarterly 15, no. 4 (Winter 1952)., fig. 7, ill., p. 304, text, p. 301. ⇒ includes 
text
text
Baur, John I.H. Commemorative Exhibition: Paintings by Martin Johnson Heade and Fitz Hugh Lane from the Karolik Collections in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. New York: M. Knoedler & Co., 1954. (exhibition brochure). ⇒ includes text
text
Sharf, Frederic Alan. "Fitz Hugh Lane: Visits to the Maine Coast, 1848–55." Essex Institute Historical Collections 98 (April 1962). ⇒ includes text
text
Wilmerding, John. Fitz Hugh Lane: The First Major Exhibition. Lincoln, MA: De Cordova Museum; in association with Colby College Art Museum, 1966., no. 44. ⇒ includes text
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Wilmerding, John. Fitz Hugh Lane. New York: Praeger, 1971.
Paintings and Drawings by Fitz Hugh Lane. Gloucester, MA: Cape Ann Historical Association, 1974.
Brooklyn Museum. The Brooklyn Museum: American Paintings. Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum, 1979., ill., p. 77.
Gerdts, William H. "'The Sea is His Home': Clarence Cook Visits Fitz Hugh Lane." The American Art Journal 17, no. 3 (Summer 1985)., ill., p.48. ⇒ includes text
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Wilmerding, John. Paintings by Fitz Hugh Lane. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art; in association with Harry N. Abrams, 1988., no. 46, ills. , p. 106 (in color, detail), fig. 28, p. 149.
Wilmerding, John. "Fitz Hugh Lane." The Artist's Mount Desert: American Painters on the Maine Coast. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994, pp. 45–67., fig. 59, p.65. ⇒ includes text
text
Wilton, Andrew, and Tim Barringer. American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820–1880. London: Tate Publishing, 2002., cat. 66, ill. in color, p. 189, text, pp. 188, 254, 270.
American Paintings in the Brooklyn Museum: Artists Born by 1876. Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum, 2006., ill., pl. 44, p. 746.
Carbone, Teresa A. An American View: Masterpieces from the Brooklyn Museum. Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum, 2006., ill., p. 63.
Commentary
The frequent summer cruises along the coast of Maine in the 1850s stimulated Lane to create some of his purest landscapes. Beginning with Twilight on the Kennebec, 1849 (inv. 258), from what was likely Lane’s first Maine trip in 1848, to Lumber Schooners at Evening on Penobscot Bay, 1863 (inv. 343) and others in the 1860s, these landscapes are relatively free of the human and marine activity that Lane commonly documented in his Gloucester and Boston paintings. Their subject is the intense color and mood of the twilight or sunrise hours on the landscape as viewed over water. One feels Lane’s awe of the scale and intensity of the Maine coast—its wildness and drama—compared to the gentler and more populated coast of Massachusetts.
This painting is a lovely, quiet work that contrasts the moody stillness of an empty cove with the sunlight hitting the ascending peaks of Mount Desert Island as they rise out of the clouds. It is an unusually unpopulated scene for Lane, though there are two vessels on either side of the composition, placed almost as afterthoughts. The cove has a few swimming seabirds and there are two birds standing on the rocks, but the most animated shapes are the dead trees. They stand in articulated poses with their branches leading the eye from the foreground tree on the right directly to the one in the middle distance and up to the peaks as they rise to the height of the island.
The painting appears so straightforward that it is easy to miss the artfulness of Lane’s design. He has composed the elements using his familiar X pattern. In this case, the curve of the cove and the light on the water on the lower left lead the eye out to the ship and beyond, to the glow of the sunrise at the horizon. The other side of the X goes from the dark rocks in the lower right foreground to the dead tree that points to a second dead tree, on the island. The eye continues to follow as this tree points up to the highest peak in the upper left.
Note the wonderful rhythm Lane has set up with the three descending peaks leading down to the water and the ship. While not unaware of the drama of the sun hitting off the peaks, Lane has restrained the impulse for exaggeration and stepped them down to the sea in stages, thus connecting their immensity with the subdued intimacy of the foreground cove and shore.
Lane's restraint is in interesting contrast to his peers of the Hudson River School, who were winning over clients and critics with increasingly dramatic scenes of pyrotechnic skies over vast wildernesses. Lane could have easily reverted to drama here, but would have lost the essence of the predawn moment on an anonymous cove in Maine that is the heart of this painting.
– Sam Holdsworth