Ship in Fog, Gloucester Harbor,

ca. 1860

While Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Church, whose work hangs nearby, represented exceptional scenes in nature with theatrical grandeur, a group of artists later called Luminists focused instead on qualities of light and atmosphere in more subdued but acutely observed and affecting works. Ships in Fog, Gloucester Harbor presents a quotidian view of a still harbor, implying in its seemingly random composition that only a glimpse of a wider and fluctuating world is shown. Without a privileged subject, Lane’s work stresses the interconnected ness of its components, including the fog itself, which touches and inflects everything. Insisting on the equivalent importance of all that he observed, the artist offered a less heroic conception of nature than his Hudson River School contemporaries. Lane began his career as a conventional ship portraitist but late in life produced increasingly subtle and complex compositions such as this quiet masterpiece.