Fitz Henry Lane

Fitz Hugh Lane ( born December 18, 1804 in Gloucester, Massachusetts, † August 13, 1865 ibid ), actually Nathaniel Rogers Lane, was an American painter and lithographer, known especially for his ship portraits. He is regarded as one of the main painter of the American Luminism he developed about the same time as the painters of the Hudson River School.

Life and work

Fitz Hugh Lane was born in 1804 in Gloucester on the coast of Massachusetts. He had, probably due to a disease of polio at the age of two years, already go as a child on crutches. As a teenager, he began drawing and painting and in 1832 he worked for a short time at a lithographer in Gloucester. In the same year he began an apprenticeship in Boston with William S. Pendleton, who ran the largest lithography Company of Boston, and remained there until 1837. During this tenure, he produced lithographs for notes and landscape pictures.

Lane learned in Boston know the work of the English marine painter Robert Salmon, who also lived and worked here in Pendleton. He started in 1840 itself, so to paint oil paintings by Salmons model, and could exhibit his work in 1841 Scene at the Sea ( whereabouts unknown) in the Boston Athenaeum. This museum showed Lanes images from 1845 regularly. Until the mid-1840s to Lane focused on harbor views, landscapes and portraits ship, where he worked both as a painter as well, together with John W. Scott, as a lithographer. 1848 was a first sale to the Art Union in New York City, the more pictures later bought from him. In the same year he traveled to Maine, whose landscapes, especially around Cape Ann later made ​​up the center of his work next to Gloucester for the first time.

In 1848, Lane built together with his sister and her husband rent a house in Gloucester and returned to his birthplace. During the 1850s and 1860s he developed his style further. In the 1850s he painted, among others, a series of images of Boston Harbor. His works of the 1850s are characterized by a serene composition with clear radiant light and atmospheric effects from such as are present in the luminist works of the Hudson River School, an outer influence to the work of Lane as a whole hardly noticeable and Lane themselves hardly dealt with the works of other painters and also not frequented artistic circles. In the 1860s he focused again on the landscapes and seascapes of Gloucester and Cape Ann in Maine, where he significantly reduced the size of the images and the presentation precisely designed.

1864 deteriorated state of health and in August of that year, he suffered a heart attack or a stroke, probably as a result of a fall. He died on August 13 of the year. During his lifetime he came actually only local significance, which meant that he was later largely forgotten. Only with the renewed interest in the American 19th century painting in the 1940s as well as by a large donation pictures of the collector Maxim Karolik 1949 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston with numerous works Lanes awoke the interest in this artist again.

Image selection

Salem Harbor, 1853

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

The Yacht 'America' Winning the International Race, 1851