Fitz Henry Lane (American, 1804–1865), The Ships “Winged Arrow” and “Southern Cross” in Boston Harbor, 1853, oil on canvas, The Edwin and Virginia Irwin Memorial, 1971.31

Artist Fitz Henry Lane (1804–1865) grew up in the New England seaport of Glouster, Massachusetts. The son of a sailmaker, Lane was intimately familiar with the sailing ships of his day from the time he was a boy. As a young man, he moved to Boston and apprenticed himself to a lithographer; it was there that Lane received his training in art making. A few years after learning the trade of lithography, he took up painting and soon became a sought-after artist known for his seascapes and ship portraits, often winning commissions from ship owners and captains.

Lane was an active follower of the "Luminism" movement of the early-nineteenth-century when American artists captured a kind of glowing quality of light—or luminosity—in their landscapes and seascapes. In The Ships "Winged Arrow" and "Southern Cross" in Boston Harbor (a double ship portrait, commissioned by the ships' owner) you can see how Lane handles the illusion of sunlight penetrating the ocean's surface; he paints the waves in darker tones in the foreground and then gradually transitions to lighter tones as the ocean recedes towards the middle ground, before switching to darker tones again in the background. Lane also captures an atmospheric daylight around the ships, and a hazy image of Boston, far in the distance, spanning the length of the horizon line.

In this American scene, Lane reflects the trade, activity, and prosperity of a growing Boston in the early 1800s.

On view in Gallery 217.

Maurice Prendergast (American, 1859–1924), New England Harbor, circa 1919–23, oil on canvas, The Edwin and Virginia Irwin Memorial, 1959.51

Maurice Prendergast (1859–1924) was born in the Canadian province of New Foundland and moved to Boston with his family as a child. He received his formal art training in Paris in the 1890s and was greatly influenced by French Post-Impressionism. The movement encouraged artists to create their own individual expressions and emphasized strong structural compositions, bold use of color, and flatness of the picture plane. (Think of artwork by the likes of Van Gogh, Cezanne, Gaugin, and Seurat.)

In New England Harbor, rather than creating an illusion of depth and three-dimensionality using refined brushwork—standard practice for artists during much of the 1800s—Prendergast painted his canvas with mosaic-like patterns, brilliant colors, and textured surfaces. In the picture, the artist relegated the harbor and bay to the background, almost as after-thoughts; instead, he captured the vibrancy of this American scene by placing the townspeople up front, focusing on their colorful clothing and painting the figures in an almost abstract way.

On view in Gallery 212.