Lecture at Cape Ann Museum — Painting the Inhabited Landscape: Fitz H. Lane and the Global Reach of Antebellum America

THURSDAY, JUNE 29, 2023 at 2:00 p.m.
CAMTalks: Exhibition Series—Painting the Inhabited Landscape: Fitz H. Lane and the Global Reach of Antebellum America
with Dr. Margaretta Lovell, Jay D. McEvoy, Jr., Professor of American Art History at the University of California, Berkeley

Calling attention to unexplored dimensions of nineteenth-century painting, Painting the Inhabited Landscape is a major intervention in the scholarship on American art of the period and an enlightening examination of Fitz H. Lane’s work.

In this important study, Margaretta Markle Lovell singles out the modestly scaled, explicitly inhabited landscapes of Fitz H. Lane and investigates the patrons who supported his career, with an eye to understanding how New Englanders thought about their land, their economy, their history, and their links with widely disparate global communities. Lane’s works depict nature as productive and allied in partnership with humans to create a sustainable, balanced political economy. What emerges from this close look at Lane’s New England is a picture not of a “virgin wilderness” but of a land deeply resonant with its former uses—and a human history that incorporates, rather than excludes, Native Americans as shapers of land and as agents in that history.

Margaretta M. Lovell is a cultural historian working at the intersection of history, art history, and material culture studies. Currently the Jay D. McEvoy, Jr., Professor of American Art History at the University of California, Berkeley, she received her PhD in American Studies at Yale. Her most recent book, Painting the Inhabited Landscape: Fitz H. Lane and the Global Reach of Antebellum America (Penn State Press, April 2023), concerns F. H. Lane, Cape Ann’s landscape painter who, in the first half of the nineteenth century, captured his culture’s relationship to fish, granite, and forests on one hand and its links to China, Puerto Rico, and Surinam on the other.

Registration required for all attendees. Learn more at the Cape Ann Museum website.