Fitz Henry Lane
Fitz Henry Lane
1804 - 1865
American painter and printmaker. He established a strong local reputation among the artists and public of Boston and Gloucester, MA, the harbour town where he was born and spent the majority of his career. Yet Lane’s art never enjoyed national standing during his lifetime; not until the term LUMINISM (I)—denoting the fascination with the poetic and transcendental properties of light—gained currency in the historiography of American art was his painting seen to epitomize a broader phenomenon within 19th-century American landscape painting.
Lane began his artistic career as a lithographer for the Boston firm of Pendleton in the early 1830s. By 1844 he had established his own lithography business but was also painting an increasing number of works for exhibition in Boston and occasionally New York. Lane’s style, spare, meticulous and devoid of rhetoric, developed along a consistent course from the time he first took up oil painting in 1840 to the ultimate refinement of his chosen subject-matter, marine and coastal landscapes, in the 1850s and 1860s (see fig.). From his experience in the graphic arts, he learnt the rudiments not only of perspective but of a careful and precise transcription of a particular scene. During the 1830s paintings by the British marine specialist Robert Salmon, resident in Boston, served as a model for his work. Thereafter Lane’s pictures acquired the distinctive qualities that marked his mature style: greater space devoted to the sky within the composition, the reduction and reorganization of elements within the landscape to conform to an abstract geometry, and the elimination of narrative detail as a distraction from the overall mood evoked by atmospheric and light effects. In addition, his Luminist preference for crystalline light allowed, in the words of Henry James, for a ‘perfect liberty of self-assertion to each individual object in the landscape’; James’s phrase could well apply to Lane’s work, in which light paradoxically isolates elements of the scene while unifying the whole.
Despite his meticulous rendering and attention to view, Lane was not a topographical artist. Though he worked from careful pencil sketches with colour notations, his approach to painting remained strongly conceptual, responsive to the inherent geometry of the scene. In works such as Western Shore with Norman’s Woe (1862; Gloucester, MA, Cape Ann Hist. Assoc.) and Brace’s Rock, Eastern Point (1864; priv. col.) he reoriented land masses parallel to the horizon; elsewhere, as in Owl’s Head, Penobscot Bay, Maine (1862; Boston, MA, Mus. F.A.), Lane gave a planar structure to his subject wherein vertical elements—ships’ masts and sails, or the distant forms of mountains—were rearranged to create precise visual intervals. Working with a limited number of elements allowed Lane to discipline the formal complexity of nature. He also occasionally turned to photographs, ruled into a perspective grid, as a source for his landscapes. His striving for clarity and balance betokened not only a provincial uneasiness with spatial complexity, but perhaps as well a transcendentalizing belief in the inherent order and harmony of nature. As in 17th-century Dutch marine paintings, which his work occasionally resembles, light, captured through very subtle tonal gradations, suppression of the brushstroke and modifications of local colour, served as the unifying element in his quiescent, austere scenes.
Lane drew his subjects from two main areas: the Gloucester and Boston bays and their surroundings (see fig.), and the coast of Maine around the Mount Desert and Penobscot Bay regions. The bulk of his energy was devoted to painting landscapes made intimate through a lifetime of familiarity. Unlike other painters of his generation, most notably Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt, and Martin Johnson Heade, Lane stayed close to home, partly through physical necessity (a disability dating from his early childhood left him on crutches throughout his life), but more significantly through a temperamental preference for scenes that carried personal resonance. This attachment to locale was central to his sensibility; rather than exploiting the nationalistic overtones of the large-scale exhibition landscape, he preferred to explore his native region of inlets, bays, and beaches in intimate and restrained paintings. Lane’s later work is free of picturesque incident, exuding a sense of calm immobility and mysterious power. His fascination with nature’s moments of stillness drew him towards scenes of dawn and dusk (e.g. Lumber Schooners at Evening on Penobscot Bay, 1860; priv. col.). Lane’s status as a minor master of the Luminist mode in American landscape painting derives from his sensitive rendering of a nature that tolerates human presence without being defined or contained by it. In 1988 he was the subject of a major exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, MA. [Angela L. Miller. "Lane, Fitz Henry." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 9, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T049098.]
Person TypeIndividual
Terms
