Lane, Owl's Head, Penobscot Bay, Maine

Art History

Romanticism in the United States

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Lane, Owl's Head, Penobscot Bay, Maine Fitz Henry Lane, Owl's Head, Penobscot Bay, Maine, 1862, oil on canvas, 40 x 66.36 cm / 15-3/4 x 26-1/8 inches (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

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Lane, Owl's Head, Penobscot Bay, Maine

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[music]
Dr. Steven Zucker: We're in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston
looking at Fitz Henry Lane's Owl's Head, Penobscot Bay, Maine
this is a place that Lane spent a good deal of time
and characteristic of this American artist--sometimes called a Luminist
--we have this wonderfully quiet--still--moment
Dr. Beth Harris: And that's what we mean by the term Luminism
--landscape paintings by a number of American painters--where we have a sense of calm and tranquility
--views of water--a quality of light that allows each element of the landscape to standout in perfect clarity
--but there is an overall mood of contemplativeness and peacefulness
Dr. Zucker: That's so typical of American art and especially American marine painting
--so this is dawn--we can see the peach sky in the background--and the water is still calm--the winds of the day have not started
--the ship in the background just put up its sails and is trying to catch whatever breeze is just beginning
--we look out on this space almost through the gaze of the fisherman we see in the lower left of the canvas
Dr. Harris: This is very much a romantic landscape--one that looks back on the traditions of romanticism
--we might think of Caspar David Friedrich and the way he used figures looking out to sea with their backs to us
--or we might even think about John Constable in England
--painting his native landscape of the Stour Valley with that sense of love of his native landscape
--and I think that we have that here with Lane
Dr. Zucker: There's a way that light is able to take the careful rendering of the veracity
that all this detail and clarity offers us
--but still render a painting that is largely poetic--and that's one of the issues most central to the Luminism
--that even with this high pitched specificity--there's still room for a painting that is ultimately one that is emotional
--that is almost transcendental
Dr. Harris: I think that sense of emotion comes through because of the lack of narrative incident
--we're looking at a seascape but we don't see fishermen busy with activities
--we don't see ships coming in and unloading cargo
--or other kids of narrative scenes that we might expect in a harbor
Dr. Zucker: Light is the main protagonist not the human occupation of this space
Dr. Harris: In a way for me the main protagonist is the house
that we see on that tiny little island and as you said that peach colored light
that we all know so well from looking at the water in the early morning
--We're really transported to this place--I can almost hear the water lapping at the shore
Dr. Zucker: This painting invites a kind of careful quiet contemplation
Dr. Harris: It's very different from other American landscape painting
that we might think of by Albert Bierstadt
or Frederic Church that's really grand and operatic and sublime and says something big
--and those paintings are often very large and depict sublime scenes like the Rocky Mountains or Niagara Falls
but here this kind of humble quiet scene
a kind of different strain in American landscape painting
[music]

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