Fitz Hugh Lane

Fitz Hugh Lane, drawing by Robert Cooke, 1835

Fitz Hugh Lane (born December 18, 1804 in Gloucester , Massachusetts , † August 13, 1865 ), before his official name change in 1831 Nathaniel Rogers Lane , was an American painter and lithographer who was best known for his portraits of ships . He is considered one of the central painters of luminism , which he developed around the same time as the painters of the Hudson River School .

life and work

Fitz Hugh Lane was born in Gloucester on the Massachusetts coast in 1804 . He had to walk on crutches as a child , probably due to a polio disease at the age of two. As a teenager he began painting and drawing and in 1832 worked for a short time with a lithographer in Gloucester. In the same year he began training in Boston with William S. Pendleton, who ran the largest lithography company in Boston, and stayed there until 1837. During this employment he made lithographs for music and landscapes .

Lane met the work of the English marine painter Robert Salmon in Boston , who also lived here and worked for Pendleton. In 1840 he himself began to paint oil paintings based on Salmon's model, and in 1841 was able to exhibit his work Scene at the Sea (whereabouts unknown) in the Boston Athenaeum. This museum regularly showed Lane's paintings from 1845 onwards. Until the mid-1840s Lane concentrated on port views, landscapes and portraits of ships, where he worked both as a painter and, together with John W. Scott, as a lithographer. In 1848 it was first sold to Art Union in New York City , which later bought more pictures from him. In the same year he traveled to Maine for the first time , whose landscapes, especially around Cape Ann next to Gloucester, later made the center of his work.

Boston Harbor , 1854

Boston Harbor , approx. 1850–1855

In 1848 Lane built a house in Gloucester with his sister and her husband and returned to his birthplace. He continued to develop his style during the 1850s and 1860s. In the 1850s, among other things, he painted a series of pictures of the Boston harbor. His works of the 1850s are characterized by a calm composition with clearly radiant light and atmospheric effects, such as are present in the luministic works of the Hudson River School , whereby an external influence on the work of Lane as a whole is hardly noticeable and Lane hardly concerned himself with the works of other painters and also did not associate with artistic circles. In the 1860s he concentrated again on the landscapes and sea views of Gloucester and Cape Ann in Maine, significantly reducing the format of the images and making the representation more precise.

In 1864 his health deteriorated and in August of that year he suffered a heart attack or stroke , probably as a result of a fall. He died on August 13th of that year. During his lifetime it only gained local importance, which meant that it was later largely forgotten. Only with the renewed interest in American painting of the 19th century in the 1940s and with a large picture donation by the collector Maxim Karolik in 1949 to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston with numerous works by Lane did interest in this artist awaken.

Image selection

• 

  Bowdoin College lithograph, 1845

• 

  Salem Harbor , 1853

• 

  Brace's Rock, Eastern Point, Gloucester, Massachusetts , 1864

• 

  The Yacht 'America' Winning the International Race , 1851

literature

• Stephan Koja: America. The New World in 19th Century Pictures. Prestel, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-7913-2051-3 , p. 265.
• Matthew Baigell: Dictionary of American Art. Harper & Row New York et al. a. 1979; Pp. 201-203. ISBN 0-06-433254-3.
• Thomas W. Gaethgens: Pictures from the New World. American painting of the 18th and 19th centuries Prestel, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-7913-0879-3 , p. 312.

Web links

Commons : Fitz Hugh Lane  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Fitz Hugh Lane in the Artcyclopedia

Individual evidence

1. ^ William Hauptman, Corinne Currat, Dominique Hoeltschi: Peindre l'Amérique - Les artistes du Nouveau Monde 1830-1900 . In: La Bibliothèque des Arts . 1st edition. Fondation de l'Hermitage , Lausanne 2014, ISBN 978-2-88453-186-3 , p. 168 .