Lot Essay
In 1848 Fitz Hugh Lane moved both his studio and his permanent residence from Boston to his native Gloucester. His return was influenced by the completion in 1846 of a branch of the Eastern Railroad, opening the port of Gloucester to commercial development and creating opportunities for a painter and lithographer of established reputation.
Gloucester in the late 1840s and 1850s was an area of bustling trade and tourism, speculation, and rapidly rising land prices. Lane's interest in the business and civic affairs of the area is reflected both in his involvement in local politics and the subjects of his paintings from this time period, which focus on specific views of the coast and the everyday activities of the shipping industry.
According to John Wilmerding, Beached for Repairs was painted circa 1848, about the time of Lane's permanent resettlement in the area. The painting depicts the caulking of a two masted schooner on a beach far from the bustle of Gloucester's inner harbor. One skiff is being stocked as a second approaches two becalmed schooners riding high in the water. The careful observation of detail, from the figures melting tar and swabbing it onto the ship's hull to the atmospheric haze surrounding the brig in the distance, is typical of Lane's other works from this period, notably Gloucester Harbor (1848), in the collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
Lane's familiarity with the details of marine trade was matched by his original and knowledgable delineation of the forms and riggings of the boats themselves. In an essay "Imagery and Types of Vessels", written for the 1988 National Gallery exhibition, Paintings by Fitz Hugh Lane, Erik A.R. Ronnberg, Jr., discusses Lane's unconventional attributes as a ship portraitist:
His paintings of ships are marked by a skillful use of perspective and an understanding of its effect on these objects of complex form. This is hardly surprising for an artist of the luminist movement, for the play of light on a hull and the reflections and shadows that reveal its contours are most interesting when views from unusual angles. Lane showed no hesitation to place ships in very difficult poses, and...was able to convey the geometry of the hulls and the perspective of the rigging very convincingly....
In sharp contrast to the busy, illustrative quality of many mid-century genre and marine paintings, the anecdotal aspect of Beached for Repairs is minimized. Lane freezes the moment's activity in the cool silvery light of a Gloucester morning. The luminous sky reflected in the boat's hull, the calm waters of the bay, and the windless sails, create a sense of stillness that prefigures Lane's later seascapes, in which the human presence is subordinated to the ordered serenity of nature.
Gloucester in the late 1840s and 1850s was an area of bustling trade and tourism, speculation, and rapidly rising land prices. Lane's interest in the business and civic affairs of the area is reflected both in his involvement in local politics and the subjects of his paintings from this time period, which focus on specific views of the coast and the everyday activities of the shipping industry.
According to John Wilmerding, Beached for Repairs was painted circa 1848, about the time of Lane's permanent resettlement in the area. The painting depicts the caulking of a two masted schooner on a beach far from the bustle of Gloucester's inner harbor. One skiff is being stocked as a second approaches two becalmed schooners riding high in the water. The careful observation of detail, from the figures melting tar and swabbing it onto the ship's hull to the atmospheric haze surrounding the brig in the distance, is typical of Lane's other works from this period, notably Gloucester Harbor (1848), in the collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
Lane's familiarity with the details of marine trade was matched by his original and knowledgable delineation of the forms and riggings of the boats themselves. In an essay "Imagery and Types of Vessels", written for the 1988 National Gallery exhibition, Paintings by Fitz Hugh Lane, Erik A.R. Ronnberg, Jr., discusses Lane's unconventional attributes as a ship portraitist:
His paintings of ships are marked by a skillful use of perspective and an understanding of its effect on these objects of complex form. This is hardly surprising for an artist of the luminist movement, for the play of light on a hull and the reflections and shadows that reveal its contours are most interesting when views from unusual angles. Lane showed no hesitation to place ships in very difficult poses, and...was able to convey the geometry of the hulls and the perspective of the rigging very convincingly....
In sharp contrast to the busy, illustrative quality of many mid-century genre and marine paintings, the anecdotal aspect of Beached for Repairs is minimized. Lane freezes the moment's activity in the cool silvery light of a Gloucester morning. The luminous sky reflected in the boat's hull, the calm waters of the bay, and the windless sails, create a sense of stillness that prefigures Lane's later seascapes, in which the human presence is subordinated to the ordered serenity of nature.