Catalog entry

Commentary

This painting is a masterpiece of Lane’s late work. The pellucid calm of the cove, the otherworldly glow of early twilight, the empty stage set of the beach spotted by the dark rocks of low tide, Norman’s Woe glowing in the distance—all epitomize the direction of Lane’s late work and the transcendent luminism for which he is most famous. Perhaps no other painting by Lane better embodies the transcendentalist’s vision of the presence of God and of man merging with a pristine Nature.

Though we have no direct evidence of Lane’s association with transcendentalist thought, he was certainly exposed to it through multiple lectures in Gloucester by Emerson and Thoreau. It is hard not to associate The Western Shore with Norman's Woe with the oft-quoted line from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s "Nature," “I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me...” Lane’s lifelong fascination with the detail and anecdote of ships and harbors has been distilled into this pure expression of light and place, truly a masterpiece of the “poetry of emptiness,” a term often applied by scholars to Lane’s late work.

The painting is taken from a drawing, Norman's Woe, 1861 (inv. 114), on which it is noted that two paintings were made, one for Florence Foster and one for Benjamin H. Smith. Florence Foster was a good friend of Isabel Lane, who donated this picture to the Cape Ann Museum, suggesting that perhaps this was the version made for her.

The drawing is more fully developed and shaded than many of Lane’s sketches and is carefully gridded into squares for transfer onto canvas. Note the more prominent foliage in the left foreground of the drawing that is de-emphasized in this version of the painting, though more accurately reproduced in the other, Norman's Woe, Gloucester Harbor, 1862 (inv. 1). It may have been that Lane did that version first in a larger and more horizontal format, and then removed some of the detail and compressed the scene in this second version.

The composition takes the eye in an arc around the cove and out to the small island called Norman’s Woe, which glows in the distance. The foliage in the center foreground of the beach—shown in the drawing—has been removed, allowing the eye to proceed directly into the glassy calm of the cove and out to the sky and the cloud-form building in the distance. The far-off ship gives scale and distance to the scene while the pinky, with its sails set but nearly adrift, provides a boundary to the left edge of the composition.

The seaweed-covered rocks are an impossibly rich dark brown, in startling contrast to the brilliant sky that is reflected in the water of the cove. Note the colors in the sky, which transition from a purple in the upper left through a series of almost metallic, coppery yellows to the right. Seen at close hand, the coloration is almost surreal. It is not what one expects in a twilight sky and water, yet when one steps back, the colors integrate into a pervasive evening glow that is much more than the sum of its parts.

– Sam Holdsworth

Related Work in the Catalog

Supplementary Images

Infrared image (detail of grass in foreground)

Photo: Marcia Steele
© Cape Ann Museum

Infrared image (detail)

Photo: Marcia Steele
© Cape Ann Museum

Infrared image (detail of reflection)

Photo: Marcia Steele
© Cape Ann Museum

Viewpoint chart showing Lane's location when making this image

The Western Shore with Norman's Woe (detail of monument on Norman's Woe)

Photo: © Cape Ann Museum