Catalog entry

Commentary

This painting is taken from the 1847 drawing of the view of Fort Point and Ten Pound Island, Lane then painted three versions, likely all in the 1847-48 period. In this View of Gloucester Harbor, 1848, the sun is about to set casting a reddish light across Harbor Cove and Gloucester’s Outer Harbor. A light breeze barely causes ripples on the water while the sails of a lumber brig and a schooner hang slack. 

All is serenely quiet on the water and on Fort Point, and the foreground activity has become the center of attention. At left, a small sloop – probably a party boat – is shoving off from the end of Duncan’s Point Rocks, perhaps having picked up another passenger to enjoy an evening sail around the harbor. These were the early days of tourism and vacationing on Cape Ann, and Lane would be depicting more of it in the next decade. 

Below, at far left, is a dory used for shore fishing, though what type of fishing is uncertain. The barrel on board could have been used for lobster bait, or the lobsters, reflecting a growing market for the crustaceans. Strewn around the dory are a discarded codfish, a skate, and an old vessel’s rudder. More detritus of this sort would appear in later harbor views. 

At center in the foreground is a double-ended New England boat with the type’s characteristic rig: two unstayed masts with two gaff-headed sails, and no bowsprit or jib. Her hull is of the more common lapstrake construction, coated with oil and pitch instead of painted. She is decked and probably fitted with a cuddy in the bow to provide shelter for the crew, but has no stove or fireplace. This workboat type had its origin in the colonial shallops, evolving slowly to this design by the late 18^th century. Its smooth-planked square-stern form (seen at its mooring in Harbor Cove) was probably an early 19^th century offshoot. 

Alongside the New England boat, a table has been set up for dressing the catch. The last cod is being gutted, its head having already joined the others in a pile beside the table. Two of the boat’s crew are carrying off dressed cod in a hand barrow to sell to a nearly fish dealer, or to a restaurant catering to summer visitors. Fish caught and prepared like this were intended for the local market and would fetch a higher price than if salted and dried. 

Scattered on the ground around the New England boat is an assortment of detritus: two large fronds of kelp, a matted clump of seaweed, some clam shells, and the bottom of a broken earthenware jug. Just beyond is the New England boat’s anchor—one of the earliest depictions of a “fisherman’s anchor” whose wooden stock was wedged in a diamond-shaped eye in the anchor’s shank, just below the hawser ring. Fitting the anchor stock this way made it easy to remove for stowing. 

At far right in the harbor is a small double-ended boat being paddled (or poled, the water being so shallow at low tide) by a single occupant. Though it somewhat resembles a Maine peapod, it is too early to have been a variant of that type. It may simply have been a scaled-down version of a New England boat, an anomaly amidst our standard classifications of this period’s workboats. 

At far right in the foreground are two men in conversation, the one in brown attire leaning on his clamming fork, a basket of fresh-dug clams and his dog beside him. Is the artist (Lane) posing himself as a clamdigger in his painting? His facial features seem to hint at this possibility though there are no signs of crutches or other evidence of his infirmity. Having just moved back to Gloucester, he would have only begun to find his way back into the social fabric of Cape Ann. Was placing himself in his paintings a way of reasserting his identity as a Gloucester son?

–Erik Ronnberg

Related Work in the Catalog

Supplementary Images

Proposed viewpoint of Lane when creating the picture. Viewpoint plottings by Erik Ronnberg using U.S... [more]. Coast Survey sketch chart of Gloucester Harbor 1855.