Displaying items by tag: marine painting

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.