Displaying items by tag: Fitz Henry Lane

An archetype of American marine painting by Luminist master Fitz Henry Lane (1804–65), entitled Ship in Fog (oil on canvas, ca. 1860), has been acquired by the Princeton University Art Museum. The painting dramatically bolsters the Museum’s esteemed holdings of American art, particularly American Luminism, and will substantially increase the collection’s utility as a research and teaching resource.

Ship in Fog is set in Gloucester Harbor from the vantage point of the open water, looking toward land. Lane rendered several seagoing vessels in a shroud of fog illuminated by the hazy late-afternoon sun, with the harbor’s Ten Pound Island and its lighthouse barely visible in the middle distance. In sharper focus in the foreground appear the backs of two figures in a rowboat and a meticulously rendered schooner brig at anchor nearby.

New technology and fresh perspectives are jumpstarting efforts to assemble exhaustive lists of works by 19th-century American painters, sometimes in progress for decades. Next month a consortium of museums interested in the Massachusetts maritime painter Fitz Henry Lane (1804-65) will introduce a website, fitzhenrylaneonline.org, documenting about 320 paintings, drawings and prints at various institutions. Much of the material is being drawn from the Cape Ann Museum, in Mr. Lane’s hometown, Gloucester, Mass., and images on the website will be linked to infrared paint analyses, biographies of Mr. Lane’s clients, newspaper ads for his suppliers, maps of harbors where he sketched and portraits of owners of the ships moored there.

A painting by Fitz Henry Lane, an American painter and printmaker from Gloucester, Massachusetts, recently sold for $1,384,000 million at an auction at Skinner, Inc. in Boston. Camden Mts. From the Graves was the top lot at the sale of American and European Works, which grossed $3.2 million in total. The record for Lane at auction is $5.5 million, which was set at Skinner in 2004.

Lane, who is often associated with Luminism due to his use of pervasive light, frequently painted marine scenes. Robin Starr, Skinner’s vice president and director of American & European Works of Art, said, “[Camdens Mts. From the Graves] has all the elements you expect to see in a strong Lane of his mature style. It has the wonderful sense of quiet in it. You have everything from the golden hour light catching the sails to the two figures you can see in the catboat in the foreground.”

The painting, which was signed and dated ‘FH Lane 1862,’ was created during one of the four well-documented trips Lane made to Maine during his career.

The schooner yacht America has been the subject of more paintings than any other pleasure or commercial vessel, perhaps rivaled only by the frigate Constitution. In 1851, the year of her victorious race off Cowes, England, she was portrayed by many of the most noted American and British marine artists of the day, and remains a favorite subject in paintings by many of today’s marine artists.

Conceived at the instigation of an English businessman, built in one of New York’s foremost shipyards, and sailed by a syndicate of New York yachtsmen, the America was intended to demonstrate the United States’ shipbuilding skill at Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition at London in 1851. America was designed by George Steers, who was then employed at the shipyard of William H. Brown and assigned by Brown to supervise the schooner’s construction. Brown had agreed to build the vessel under a contract that made him its owner unless or until the syndicate decided it had a winner and agreed to purchase it. After different trial races, America was purchased by the syndicate and sailed to England to race for, and win, a trophy which we know today as the America’s Cup.