Nature's Nation

Lane began his painting career producing ship portraits—relatively formulaic images made on commission to record a vessel’s appearance—for the thriving merchant marine of his native Gloucester, Massachusetts. He later expanded his register with more extensive harbor and other littoral views, of which The Fort and Ten Pound Island, Gloucester, Massachusetts is a typical early example. It shows a variety of boats and ships, each adapted to its particular use, in a mundane setting with sailors, fishermen, and others distributed throughout both land and water. […] Most of Lane’s views are rendered from careful sketches done onshore, gazing out to sea. More seldom, they are taken from a point at sea, looking back to land, a feat accomplished only with difficulty since the artist was paralyzed as a young child and used crutches. Lane’s bodily immobility stands in poignant contrast to the gliding vessels he portrayed in nearly all his paintings, in one of which, from late in his career, he positions himself in the middle of Gloucester Harbor, looking toward the same Ten Pounds Island seen from the opposite side in the painting of about a dozen years before. Ship in the Fog, Gloucester Harbor is a rare portrayal by Lane of the most difficult of atmospheric effects to render, attempted in only a few of his later works. If The Fort and Ten Pound Island implies in its random composition that only a fragment of a wider world can be capture in representation, Ship in Fog makes the impossibility of comprehensive vision its very subject. And yet what is shown reveals the intimate connections between each part, of all with the fog itself. The enveloping vapor seems an apt metaphor for a fundamental problem of landscape imagery—the inability to see anything more than selected surfaces, or to construct anything more than an artifice of nature—even as it expresses the essential ecological character of Lane’s work. Touching and inflecting everything, it exists only as the result of forces—temperature, humidity, the movement of air—outside its own. --Karl Kusserow John Wilmerding Curator of American Art at the Princeton University Art Museum