Fitz Henry Lane - Style

Style

From one of his first copied lithographs, View of the Town of Gloucester, Mass (1836), to his very last works, Lane would incorporate many of the following arrangements and techniques consistently in the composition of his art works, both his lithographs and paintings:

• Nautical subject matter
• Depiction of various naval craft in highly accurate detail
• An over-all extensive amount of detail
• The distinctive expanse of sky
• Pronounced attention to depicting the interplay of light and dark
• Hyper-accentuated vegetation within the immediate foreground
• An elevated "insider point of view" perspective

Perhaps most characteristic element of Lane's paintings is the incredible amount of attention paid to detail—probably due in part to his lithographic training, as the specific style of lithography that was popular at the time of his training was characterized by the goal of verisimilitude.

In terms of Lane's influences and relations to the artistic tradition of Luminism, Barbara Novak, in her book "American Painting in the Nineteenth Century", relates Lane's later works to Ralph Waldo Emerson's Transcendentalism (which she relates directly to the emergence of Luminism), claiming that " was the most 'transparent eyeball", and that this was evidenced by Lane's balancing of what Novak describes as the "contributions of the primitive and the graphic traditions to his art", the primitive being what he learned on his own by first observing and interacting with the surrounding environment he sought to depict, and the graphic being those skills Lane acquired through working as a lithographer. This balance does indeed seem to support the connection of Lane's works with Luminism, as one definition of luminist art is that "characterized by a heightened perception of reality carefully organized and controlled by principles of design. As one of the styles of landscape painting to emerge in the nineteenth century, luminism embraced the contemporary preoccupation with nature as a manifestation of God's grand plan. It was luminism more than any other of the schools that succeeded in imbuing an objective study of nature with a depth of feeling. This was accomplished through a genuine love and understanding of the elements of nature—discernible in the intimate arrangement of leaves on a bough—and their arrangement to reveal the poetry inherent in a given scene."