Catalog entry

Commentary

Albert Conant, an artist, printer, publisher and art teacher, commissioned several lithography firms to print his city views of Baltimore, Norwich, Connecticut, and six towns in Massachusetts. Lane & Scott printed six of the eight. This view of New Bedford is a stunning accomplishment for Conant who did the original sketch and for Fitz Henry Lane who augmented Conant’s work and then drew the image on stone.

From the Fairhaven shore, on the east bank of the Acushnet River, Albert Conant looked due west and drew the detailed, if distant, view of New Bedford which Lane used to make this lithograph. Lane’s earliest known visit to New Bedford was in 1856, on the occasion of the New York Yacht Club regatta. He was thus reliant on Conant for an accurate depiction of the city.

The vessels in this view are another story. At center is the steamboat “Massachusetts,” built in 1842 for the Nantucket Steamboat Company for operation between Nantucket, Cape Cod ports, and New Bedford. The smaller sailing vessels – several sloops of various sizes and a topsail schooner aground – were in the coastal trade, transporting passengers and goods among the harbors and islands around Buzzard’s Bay and beyond.

Dominating the scene are the ships of New Bedford’s whaling fleet (which was then the largest in the country), but not just the ships in the middle ground. Looking beyond them to the city’s waterfront, we see a forest of masts belonging to dozens of whaling ships tied up at the wharves, fitting out for new voyages or recently arrived, unloading oil from completed voyages of three or four years. This activity afloat was to become typical of Lane’s later harbor scenes: vessels carefully arranged to lead the eye around the harbor and back to the wharves and the waterfront activity.

If it is true that he never visited New Bedford prior to 1856, Lane’s sources for the details of the whaleships are intriguing. There were some whaling voyages out of Massachusetts seaports north of Boston, including a few out of Gloucester. Assuming those ships followed New Bedford whalers in aspects of outfits and rigging, it seems likely that Lane would have studied and drawn them, assisted by contemporary published views of whaling ships in lithographs or newspaper articles.

–Erik Ronnberg

References:

George Francis Dow, “Whale Ships and Whaling” (Salem, MA: Marine Research Society, 1925), p. 183

Sally Pierce and Catharina Slautterback, “Boston Lithography, 1825 – 1880” (Boston, MA: The Boston Athenaeum, 1991), pp. 141, 177.

“New Bedford and Old Dartmouth: A Portrait of a Region’s Past” (New Bedford, MA: Old Dartmouth Historical Society, 1975), p. 124.