Category: Fitz Hugh Lane

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Images of Maine’s past

A new acquisition which you can’t see until next summer, and thousands of historic photos you can browse at any time.

The Lumber Schooner, Fitz Henry Lane, 1850, Penobscot Marine Museum

This summer an important painting by Fitz Henry Lane was donated to the Penobscot Marine Museumin Searsport. The Lumber Schooner has close ties to the local community. It’s been in the same family from the time it was painted in 1850 until it was left to the museum by the late Ellen Guild Moot.

Edward Dyer Peters was born in Blue Hill, ME in 1785. He and his brother John entered the lumber business in Ellsworth before he was fifteen years old. Ellsworth, located on the Union River, was a major lumber port. For example, in 1859, when the town’s population was 4,009, Ellsworth had nine sawmills, eight box-makers, thirteen shipbuilders, eight brickyards, five pail factories, two gristmills, one tannery, one carding machine, one pottery maker, two edge tool factories, and a carriage manufacturer.
Ship in Fog, Gloucester Harbor, ca. 1860, Fitz Henry Lane, Princeton University Art Museum
At that time, the lumber trade in Maine was speculative. Lumber was cut here and shipped to Massachusetts, where it fetched whatever ship captains could get for it. In 1811, Peters founded the Davenport, Peters Co. and moved to Boston to act as a wholesale lumber agent. He maintained an inventory and sent orders back to Maine, thus establishing a stable price structure for Maine wood products. When he died in 1856, he was a very wealthy man.
By 1850, when this painting was made, Fitz Henry Lane was Boston’s most popular maritime painter. Born in Gloucester, he was steeped in saltwater. He likely would have followed his father into the sail-making trade had he not been paralyzed as a toddler from ingesting jimsonweed. After an abortive apprenticeship as a shoemaker, he returned to his first calling, art. He was largely self-taught, refining his skills while working at a lithography shop in Boston.
Clipper Ship ‘Southern Cross’ Leaving Boston Harbor, 1851, Fitz Henry Lane
In addition to his views of Boston, Gloucester and the Maine coast, Lane did commissioned portraits of sailing vessels for Boston merchants. This painting, one of three bought by Peters, was probably such a commission, since it’s one of the modest lumber schooners of Maine upon which Peters built his fortune.
Lane often painted boats in close proximity. Whether this was artistic license or reflected the activity of the coastal shipping scene, I can’t say. Coastal waters were very busy in the 19th century. Penobscot Bay often saw more than 10,000 sailing vessels in a season. Shipping by water was (and remains) the cheapest way to move cargo long distances. 
Salem Harbor, 1853. Fitz Henry Lane, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Here, the lowly lumber schooner is seen off Gloucester’s Eastern Point Light, Boston-bound. There’s another coastal schooner, a fishing schooner, and a lone boat out fishing, all in a small patch of flurried water. Imagine creating such a scene of trucks on Interstate 90, and you begin to see the genius of Fitz Henry Lane.
You’ll have to wait until May to see this painting, but Penobscot Marine Museum has a great collection of maritime photographs that are perfect for curling up in front of the fire. The National Fisherman Collection is a collection of pre-digital images of the commercial fishing industry. In 2012, Diversified Communications of Portland, ME, donated the magazine’s entire pre-digital archive to the Museum. Curators have already digitized, catalogued and released thousands of images. If you can’t find something there to amuse yourself, you’re not even trying.
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Hand over fist

Unfinished, by Carol L Douglas, 16X20, oil on canvas. (The color is distorted because it was dark when I shot this.)
Over the past three years, I have become enamored of the luminist paintings of Fitz Henry Lane. That doesn’t mean I want to paint like him, but I love the space and light in his paintings. I started this boat painting with him in mind, but I did not look at his work. I wanted his technique to suffuse my understanding, rather than push me toward painting like him.
If I’m unsure about the composition, I compare it to this grid I learned in a workshop taught by Steven Assael. 
Sailboats are elegant, and they glide like living creature across the sea. I generally paint them at dock because it is extremely difficult to paint them en plein airin motion, (although I did give it a try at Rye in 2013).
My underpainting. The sky is a complete fabrication. I need to recapture some of the bluntness of this when I finish the painting.
 Last summer, Howard Gallagher of Camden Falls Gallery took Lee Boyntonand me out to see the start of the Eggemoggin Reach Regatta . (It’s a great gallery owner who cares that much for his painters.) It made me passionately want to paint boats in motion.
My reference photo, taken at the start of the Eggemoggin Reach Regatta.
On Monday, I wrote about consistencyand how your style is ultimately your brand. A reader asked how one can experiment, grow and change while still being consistent. Artists know that the creative process never ends; you wrestle through one technical problem only to be faced by another.
Ironically, that was the precise problem I found myself facing. I went back to first principles. I drew and drew the boat until I was confident about its proportions. Since I was unsure of how to divide the space, I used a grid taught by Steven Assael.
Boston Harbor was painted by Fitz Henry Lane around 1850. 
The end result taps into Lane’s luminism, but is by no means a slavish copy. It is both consistent with my work and yet it explores new material. It’s not finished, but it is a good start.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2015 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops! Download a brochure here.

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Atmospheric perspective

Atmospheric enough for you?
Today was damp and drizzly—a perfect opportunity to consider atmospheric perspective. We did so at Glen Cove in Rockport, where on a clear day we can see islands in the far distance. Today was not a clear day; it became steadily less clear as we went on.
Matt’s view of the above scene. Yes, those are water droplets on his canvas.
Atmospheric (or aerial) perspective is the tendency of objects far away to have less contrast and chroma than objects nearby. In painting, we create the illusion of depth by depicting more distant objects as lighter and less-detailed than closer objects.
Pamela chose a long view of a boat at anchor. By the time she finished, the scene was monochromatic.
That’s not just a painterly convention. Solar radiation approaches the Earth in a direct beam, but is then scattered around in our atmosphere. That’s what gives us blue skies, pink sunsets and atmospheric perspective. On a clear day, there’s more of it bouncing around between you and that distant hill than between you and your coffee cup, so the distant hill looks bluer.
Nancy chose the same view, and experienced the same change in conditions.
Of course, when fog comes into play, it is water droplets that obscure that distant hill. However, the effect is the same. The easiest way to execute it is to just add some of the sky color—whether that’s blue, or grey, or violet—into the greens of the distant hills. The more distant the object, the more sky color should be added to it.
Sue chose the beach view.
At about 2 PM, the atmospherics had gotten a bit too thick to see much of anything at all, so we had a cup of hot tea and proceeded to the Farnsworth.  There we saw, among many fantastic paintings, Fitz Henry Lane’s Shipping in Down East Waters (1854) which is a luminous painting of boats in fog. Nothing like seeing how a master did it!
Sue hard at work.

And if these days weren’t enough, my intrepid students went out last night and painted the full moon over Chickawaukie Lake:
Matt’s view across Chickawaukie Lake.

Pamela’s view across Chickawaukie Lake showed the sinuous ripples that were there.
Matt’s second view across Chickawaukie Lake.
Nancy’s view across Chickawaukie Lake.

Pamela’s second view across Chickawaukie Lake.
The second of my Maine workshops started today. August and September are sold out , but there are openings in October! Check here for more information.
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Top ten seascapes of all time!!!

A recent Guardian columnsought to identify the ten best sea pictures of all time. I propose an alternative list, not the “best”—because the idea of “top ten paintings” is in itself ridiculous—but ten equally brilliant and perhaps less famous seascapes, here presented in no particular order. (My apologies to Turner and Monet; I only omitted them because everyone knows they’re brilliant.)

Have you any to add to this list?

Fitz Hugh Lane, Becalmed Off Halfway Rock (Casco, ME), 1860
Fitz Hugh Lane painted a narrow repertoire—ships and the ocean—but he perfectly captured the atmospherics of the sea. Long after the fact, he and his contemporaries would be lumped together as “luminists.” It’s a good description of Lane’s aerial perspective on tranquil, hazy days.
Frederic Edwin Church, The Icebergs, 1861
Frederic Edwin Church is also called a luminist, but he’s very different from Lane in that his compositions are never tranquil. He was one of the first artists who actually traveled to see what he was painting. The Icebergs was done in studio from sketches he made during a one-month schooner cruise through the North Atlantic. (A painting which mines the same material but is stylistically different is Caspar David Friedrich’s The Sea of Ice. Note that both include broken boats, symbolising the reaches of man’s endeavors.)

Richard Diebenkorn, Seawall, 1957

A first-generation Bay Area Figurative painter, Richard Diebenkorn moved from abstract expressionism to figurative painting back to abstract expressionism.  His ability to simplify his paintings into brilliant, recognizable parts simply amazes me.

Jamie Wyeth, Smashing Pumpkins, Monhegan, 2007
Like the writer Haruki Murakami, Jamie Wyeth can make you simultaneously marvel at his technique and laugh out loud. When I saw this painting in person, I boggled at how convincing the water is; that is somewhat lost in this rendering.
JoaquĂ­n Sorolla, Bulls in the Sea, 1903
There is another version of Joaquin Sorolla’s Bulls in the Sea at the Hispanic Society in New York that I actually like better for its composition. But I can’t find a well-lighted version online. (No surprise there; the Hispanic Society gallery isn’t well lighted, either.)
Sorolla painted countless paintings of the sea, and it’s tough to choose a favorite. Work, play, child, adult, misery, fun—he catalogued it all. But I think I love these paintings as much for the sails as for the bulls.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder,  Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c. 1558
Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “Icarus” has to be the seascape about which the most poetry has been written. “Landscape With the Fall of Icarus” by William Carlos Williams is here, and W.H. Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts” is here. Both are wonderful.
The painting employs Bruegel’s signature move: the most important part of the painting takes place in a relatively inconspicuous corner of the canvas.
Frank Carmichael, The Bay of Islands, 1931
Canada has more coastline than any other nation in the world (265,523 km) so it stands to reason that their Group of Seven painters made a lot of pictures of it. The Great White North is inseparable from the sea. I adore the Group of Seven, so I’ll give you two of them, including Frank Carmichael, above.
Lawren Harris, Off Greenland, Arctic Sketch XIX, 1930
Lawren Harris’ plein air field sketch, above, sold in 2011 for a whopping $1.77 million Canadian. (Gotta love that!) Like Rockwell Kent, Harris’ seascapes are deceptively simple.
John Singleton Copley, Watson and the Shark, 1778
John Singleton Copley never visited Havana and probably never met a shark (seeing as this one has lips). But this commemorative painting—commissioned by Brook Watson, the shark attack victim—is compelling in its sheer liveliness. The young Watson was not rescued until the third try. He lost his leg in the attack. I bet he dined out on that story for the rest of his life.
Édouard Manet, Moonlight over the Port of Boulogne, 1869
Édouard Manet is another artist who frequently painted the sea. Would the stars indeed have been this bright in a port city in 1869? Does it matter?
I’m off to the sea myself in the morning, to teach the second of my Maine workshops. If you’re signed up for my July workshop in mid-coast Maine, you can find the supply lists here. There’s one more residential slot left; I’m dying to know who is going to fill it. August and September are sold out , but there are openings in October! Check here for more information.