FITZ HUGH LANE 1804-1865
Ship Starlight, c. 1860
Oil on canvas, 30 X 50" (76.20 x 127.00 cm.)
Unsigned
Museum purchase, S28-0-127

A painter of ships and marine views for all of his life, Fitz Hugh Lane has created, in Ship Starlight, one of the magical images of his late career. Born and raised in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he returned in the late 1840s after several years of training in Boston, he found most of his inspiration for subjects along the Massachusetts and
Maine coasts. Apprenticed in Boston at Pendleton's lithography shop, he learned the technical and expressive values of drawing in black and white, which gave all his subsequent art a fundamental command of two essential elements: tonal contrasts and meticulous delineation of details. Even this work of his late maturity reflects his mastery of that graphic training, for although it is a painting of the most delicate nuances of coloring and of atmospheric unity, its clarity, not just of form but of vision, derives from his very calculated balancing of lights and darks and equally controlled handling of line and outline.
Characteristic of Lane's work at this time, the subject of this painting only partially reveals itself. While we know the name of the vessel from the small sign on the headboard at the bow, and the date of the painting, 1860, we cannot be certain of the ship's cargo or purpose; we do not know if the artist or a patron initiated the painting; and the location of the scene is obscured in the veil of bright fog. This tantalizing fusion of the specific and identifiable with the elusive and transcendental is one of his most imaginative achievements in his last years. It was not always so in his work. Lane had learned all the conventions of ship portraiture primarily from the prevalent examples he saw of Robert Salmon's work and from English and Dutch "marines" at the annual Boston Athenaeum exhibitions.' Salmon was an established English marine artist who had emigrated to Boston in 1829, and became the fashionable painter of the genre there during the next decade and a half. One of Lane's earliest harbor scenes centering around a ship portrait was The Yacht "Northern Light" in Boston Harbor (1845, Shelburne Museum, Vt.), which had an inscription on the reverse, visible before relining, "Painted by FH Lane from a sketch by Salmon/1845." Although Lane would later give up the rather dense, cluttered composition typical of the older artist, he took over the same format of a vessel depicted in full broadside profile and occupying much of the middle ground. The motion of vessels, figures, water, and air also gives these earlier works a lively narrative underpinning, which Lane will likewise transform into the more suggestive and contemplative air seen in Ship Starlight. Throughout his career he continued to paint such conventional ship portraits of both locally familiar and nationally famous vessels, usually on commission from a ship captain or owner. At the same time, especially from the later 1850s on, his personal style and subject matter was evolving in the signature images of the New England coast, often stilled in the delicate transitional moments of dawn or twilight. In these works the dominating presence of light and atmosphere increasingly became the principal expressive elements of his vision. Having depicted countless specific sections of harbors or shorelines around Cape Ann, Massachusetts and Mount Desert Island, Maine, documented by pencil drawings on successive summer trips through the early 1850s, Lane gradually relied less on factual recording and more on the powers of his memory and imagination. The Butler Institute canvas is a classic result of this overlay of meditation and recollection, in which a known and observed vessel is projected into a ghostly world of suspended luminosity. Preceding this work, Lane had only occasionally attempted the challenge of painting scenes of mist or fog, the most notable examples being Shipping in Down East Waters (c. 1850, William A. Farnsworth Library and Art Museum, Rockland, Me.), Sunrise Through Mist (1852, Shelburne Museum, Vt.), and Bear Island, Northeast Harbor (1855, Cape Ann Historical Association, Gloucester, Mass.). Even with their special technical effects, these remain essentially depictions of recognizable places, in comparison to the silvery atmosphere enveloping the Starlight. Lane had, in fact, portrayed this vessel once before, in 1854 (Richard York Gallery, New York), and that earlier picture shows a vessel with a quite different, lower, profile of the boW.4 She is also anchored just off a wharf, most likely in Boston Harbor. Called a medium clipper ship, she was built by E. & H. 0. Briggs of South Boston, and her launching early in 1854 probably occasioned Lane's first portrait. Over the next decade she made several passages around South America to San Francisco and from there to points across the Pacific.5 During conservation, examination, and treatment of the Butler Institute canvas in 1985, not only were various abrasions noted in the paint surface, but multiple layers of pigment showing changes were discovered, and beneath them evidence of careful underdrawing in many areas of the composition. As he worked on the canvas, Lane made a number of critical adjustments, including lowering some of the spars and sails on the mizzen mast, and raising the stern and bowsprit. This last, which accounts for the discrepancy with his earlier rendering, was purely a refinement to the overall design. Here the bowsprit's line angles up to converge with the rising masts of the small schooner off the Starlight's bow; together they point to the sun burning through the fog and illuminating everything in its perfect Place.

JOHN WILMERDING