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Catalog entry

inv. 162
From West Manchester Shore
Manchester, Bakers Island, from West Manchester Shore
1850s
Graphite on paper
9 3/4 x 14 in. (24.8 x 35.6 cm)
Inscribed lower right (in pencil): From West Manchester Shore / by F.H. Lane

Related Work in the Catalog

 

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Subject Types:   Coastal Scene »
Landscape Types:   Beach »   //   Rocky Shoreline »
Cape Ann Locales:   Manchester »
Building Types:   Lighthouse »

Historical Materials
Below is historical information related to the Lane work above. To see complete information on a subject on the Historical Materials page, click on the subject name (in bold and underlined).

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Manchester-by-the-Sea is located on Cape Ann in Essex County, Massachusetts. Incorporated in 1645, Manchester has many beaches and coves, including Manchester Harbor, and several small islands off the coast. Dubbed the Gold Coast in the nineteenth century, it became a summer destination for "rusticators", wealthy families escaping the heat of their residences in Boston, Philadelphia and New York. Among these was the famous shipbuilder and merchant Robert Bennet Forbes, who built a summer house, Masconomo, in the area known as Newport Beach in 1847. Lane painted portraits of vessels built and owned by Forbes, the "Massachusetts" and the steam bark "Antelope".

Related tables: Forbes, Robert Bennet »
manuscript
Description of photograph of "Masconomo"
c. 1970
Typed transcription of photograph caption
Manchester Historical Museum, Manchester, Mass.
Image: Manchester Historical Museum

Also filed under: Forbes, Robert Bennet »

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photo (current)
Kettle Cove
Alison Anholt-White
2016
photograph
View of Kettle Cove and Baker's Island, as depicted by Lane in his painting "View from Kettle Cove" (inv.94)
Image: Alison Anholt-White

Also filed under: Site Photographs »

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map
Map of Manchester, Massachusetts
1872
map
Manchester Historical Museum
Image: Manchester Historical Museum

Also filed under: Forbes, Robert Bennet »

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photo (historical)
"Masconomo", Manchester, Mass.
Photograph
c. 1857
Manchester Historical Museum

In 1856 Robert Bennet Forbes bought nineteen acres of land for $2,800 from Israel F. Tappan in the section of the West Manchester shore known in those days as Newport. There he built Masconomo, named for the sagamore of the Agawam. In her unpublished letters to her son Robert, his wife Rose Greene Forbes wrote:

"...I think Father will put up a good sized cheap summer house, rough pillars, pine furniture etc., and very likely we shall all be there for two months next summer. He means to show people how rational people ought to live at the seaside. What nice times we shall have..."

The house was sold to Benjamin G. Boardman in 1865.

Image: Manchester Historical Museum

Also filed under: Forbes, Robert Bennet »

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photo (historical)
"Masconomo", Manchester, Massachusetts, The Robert Forbes House, 1856
Edith Perkins Cunningham
1939
Book "Family Photographs" 1:45
Privately Printed: The Riverside Press
Collection of the Forbes House Museum.
Image: Forbes House Museum
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Boston Locales, Businesses, & Buildings People: Balch, William Y.

William Y. Balch was a framer and art dealer in Boston who sold some of Lane's paintings. He sold one to a "Gentleman from Maine" who bought a picture for $485.38. Balch's store was on Tremont Row, located between the Tremont Temple and Gleason's Publishing Hall.

manuscript
1856 Expense Account 11.8.1856
Samuel Sawyer
11.8.1856
Samuel Sawyer Papers
Cape Ann Museum Library & Archives
Archive Collection exp016

"November 8. Lane. Homestead

Frame at Balch
Museum &c. &c."

Image: Cape Ann Museum Library & Archives
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PDF
view ]
letter
Joseph L. Stevens, Jr. to Samuel Mansfield, 10.17.1903
Joseph L. Stevens, Jr.
1903
Four-page letter
Collection of the Cape Ann Museum Library & Archive, Gloucester, Mass.

"[The painting] is offered you for $150 on as long time and in as many notes at 3% interest as you choose. . . I believe this to be the only important painting of Gloucester Harbor that Lane never duplicated. . . .Returning from a Gloucester visit while I was still under the roof there, father brought a print of Lane's first Gloucester view, bought of the artist at his Tremont Temple studio in Boston. An extra dollar had been paid for coloring it. For a few years it was a home delight.. . .I had been a few years in Gloucester when Lane began to come, for part of the time a while, if I remember rightly. He painted in his brother's house, "up in town" it then was. I recall visits there to see his pictures. But it was long after, that I could claim more than a simple speaking acquaintance. The Stacys were very kind, aiding him as time went on in selling paintings by lot. I invested in a view of Gloucester from Rocky Neck, thus put on sale at the old reading room, irreverently called "Wisdom Hall." And they bought direct of him to some extent, before other residents. Lane was much my senior and yet we gradually drifted together. Our earliest approach to friendship was after his abode began in Elm Street as an occupant of the old Prentiss [sic-corrected Stacy] house, moved there from Pleasant. I was a frequenter of this studio to a considerable extent, yet little compared with my intimacy at the next and last in the new stone house on the hill. Lane's art books and magazines were always at my service and a great inspiration and delight—notably the London Art Journal to which he long subscribed. I have here a little story to tell you. A Castine man came to Gloucester on business that brought the passing of $60 through my hands at 2 1/2 % commission. I bought with the $1.50 thus earned Ruskin's Modern Painters, my first purchase of an artbook. I dare say no other copy was then owned in town. . . .Lane was frequently in Boston, his sales agent being Balch who was at the head of his guild in those days. So in my Boston visits – I was led to Balch's fairly often – the resort of many artists and the depot of their works. Thus through, Lane in various ways I was long in touch with the art world, not only of New England but of New York and Philadelphia. I knew of most picture exhibits and saw many. The coming of the Dusseldorf Gallery to Boston was an event to fix itself in one's memory for all time. What talks of all these things Lane and I had in his studio and by my fireside!

For a long series of years I knew nearly every painting he made. I was with him on several trips to the Maine coast where he did much sketching, and sometimes was was [sic] his chooser of spots and bearer of materials when he sketched in the home neighborhood. Thus there are many paintings whose growth I saw both from brush and pencil. For his physical infirmity prevented his becoming an out-door colorist."

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Marks & Labels

Marks: Inscribed upper left (in black ink): 88 [numbering system used by curator A. M. Brooks upon Samuel H. Mansfield's donation of the drawings to the Cape Ann Museum]

Exhibition History

No known exhibitions.

Published References

Cape Ann 1974: Paintings and Drawings by Fitz Hugh Lane, fig. 96, Manchester, Bakers Island, from West Manchester Shore.

Related historical materials

Other Locales
People
Citation: "From West Manchester Shore, 1850s (inv. 162)." Fitz Henry Lane Online. Cape Ann Museum. http://fitzhenrylaneonline.org/catalog/entry.php?id=162 (accessed March 18, 2024).
Record last updated July 7, 2016. Please note that the information on this and all pages is periodically reviewed and subject to change.
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