Catalog entry

Commentary

This wonderful moonlit scene shows the continuation of the afternoon picnic on Indian Bar Cove shown in View of Indian Bar Cove, Brooksville, Maine, 1850 (inv. 61). Lane has shown the scene from the same location, seemingly from the water just behind the boat, but it is now a few hours later and a magnificent full moon has risen and illuminated the night sky. A few people are back in the boat, and a boy has caught a fish off the side while a man in a dinghy poles out from the shore. On shore, a couple strolls arm in arm in the moon path while three ladies in their bonnets sit together above the beach. Three men stoke a roaring fire under the embankment by the water, the light flickering in the rising smoke. The location is on the tidal Bagaduce River near Castine, the home of Lane’s good friends the Stevenses, and where he was a frequent visitor during summers he spent in Maine.

This is an unusually sentimental and even romantic scene for Lane, whose work usually has a certain formality and rigor. He rarely painted people at their leisure or in social settings. There are many calm and contemplative moments in Lane’s work, particularly in the late work as the compositions simplified and light and space became the dominant subject. However, the tranquility in those paintings is an effect of weather and light; the few people seen are anonymous and going about their business and incidental to the scene. In this work, as in the companion piece, the subject is the picnic and the people attending. In both pictures there are precisely sixteen people shown, however tiny, and one imagines Lane, or his friend Stevens, knew every one of them. This must have been a memorable event for Lane to paint it twice. Perhaps one or both of the pictures were a gift or commission for one of the attendees.

Night and moonlit scenes are very difficult to paint, and Lane only did a few, though he did many twilight paintings. Robert Salmon, the great English painter living in Boston and a major influence on Lane in his early years, did a number of very accomplished moonlit scenes that Lane may have seen that could have influenced this work or provided clues as to technique.

In a contemporary description of what may be this painting, a visitor to Lane’s studio perfectly describes the two contrasting sources of light: "a night scene with the full moon shining upon the dark tranquil waters—with a fire in the distance, which uniting with the soft rays of the moon gave it a most delightful effect."

– Sam Holdsworth

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