Catalog entry

Commentary

From simple elements Lane created in Lumber Schooners at Evening on Penobscot Bay a landscape of remarkable evocative and formal power, and of quiet beauty. Two motionless ships guide the eye diagonally across the water towards the embers of the dying sun. Most of the composition is taken up with calm water and a tranquil evening sky, set apart by the pale, blue-green silhouette of the shoreline. Compared with earlier works by Lane, the emptiness of the composition is striking; documentary qualities have become secondary to poetic ones. The simple scene is reduced to its essence; the four figures of sailors, about to enjoy the contentment of finishing a day's labour, are minute in relation to the wide vista of sea and sky. The sheer emptiness of the evening landscape, for all its beauty, inevitably lends the work a melancholy overtone.

Although until recently the work was dated to 1860, close examination of the inscription has revealed that the correct date is 1863, only two years before Lane's death, which was preceded by a period of severe ill health. It is possible that intimations of his own mortality subtly coloured Lane's vision of the end of the day in this work. Equally, Lane might be alluding with pious reverence to the beauty of the works of God. His work could, also, be seen in the context of mid-nineteenth century transcendentalism as glorying in the beauty of every object in the natural world. Our very limited knowledge of Lane's life and thought, which yields no clear sense of his artistic intentions for such a painting, allows all these avenues of interpretation to remain open.

The compositional elements from which Lane creates this memorable image are extremely straightforward. In the foreground sailors are lowering the sails of a schooner, heavily loaded with lumber, to moor her for the night; another schooner, its sails already down, can be seen in the distance. In the background is the low-lying coastline of Penobscot Bay, where the Penobscot River meets the Atlantic Ocean. The river, 350 miles in length, provided one of the main navigable routes into the richly wooded interior of Maine: accordingly it was busy with ships carrying timber out to the Atlantic coast, and from there, south to Boston. Maine white pine and spruce were in demand for ship-building and for domestic use in the growing northeastern cities.

Although Lane may have been influenced to some extent by Frederic Church's work of the period, notably the great sunset painting of 1860 Twilight in the Wilderness, he seems not to have been interested in pursuing the detailed, almost obsessive, naturalism of Church, or the younger artist's pursuit of ever more dramatic effects of light and atmosphere. Rather, Lane's last works reduce all elements – content, composition and surface – to the very minimum, creating effects of considerable originality. There is virtually no impasto on the surface of Lumber Schooners at Evening on Penobscot Bay; rather, the image seems insubstantial; its textures, like its meanings, are fugitive and suggestive.

—Tim Barringer, from his essay for "American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States 1820-1880"