The impulse in much nineteenth-century American painting and culture was to describe nature as a wilderness on which the young nation might freely inscribe its future: the United States as a virgin land, that is, unploughed, unfenced, and unpainted. Insofar as it exhibited evidence of a past, its traces pointed to a geologic or cosmic past, not a human one. The work of the New England artist Fitz H. Lane, however, was decidedly different.
In this important study, Margaretta Markle Lovell singles out the more modestly scaled, explicitly inhabited landscapes of Fitz H. Lane and investigates the patrons who supported his career, with an eye to understanding how New Englanders thought about their land, their economy, their history, and their links with widely disparate global communities. Lane’s works depict nature as productive and allied in partnership with humans to create a sustainable, balanced political economy. What emerges from this close look at Lane’s New England is a picture not of a “virgin wilderness” but of a land deeply resonant with its former uses—and a human history that incorporates, rather than excludes, Native Americans as shapers of land and as agents in that history.
Calling attention to unexplored dimensions of nineteenth-century painting, Painting the Inhabited Landscape is a major intervention in the scholarship on American art of the period, examining how that body of work commented on American culture and informs our understanding of canon formation.
Margaretta Markle Lovell is Jay D. McEvoy, Jr. Professor of American Art History at the University of California, Berkeley. Her many publications include the prizewinning Art in a Season of Revolution: Painters, Artisans, and Patrons in Early America and A Material World: Culture, Society, and the Life of Things in Early Anglo-America, the latter also published by Penn State University Press.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: A Small City with a Far Reach
1. Reputation: Lane, Gloucester’s “Own Artist,” 1842–1865
2. Value: Lane, 1865–2020
3. Canvas: Names, Naming, and Identity
4. Fish: Lane’s Gloucester
5. Lumber: Lane’s Maine
6. Granite: Shipwreck with Spectators
7. Travelers I: Surinam and California
8. Travelers II: Ireland, China, Puerto Rico
Conclusion
Appendix A: Exhibitions and Sales That Included Fitz H. Lane Paintings During His Lifetime
Appendix B: Inventories and Lists of Located Lane Paintings, 1865–1961
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Download a PDF sample chapter here: Introduction
