Table of Contents

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

About the Author

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.

Reviews

“Painting the Inhabited Landscape offers new ways to hear Lane’s message and lets his works speak more fully and more eloquently, with their own voices. It provides an exemplary model for scholarship that invigorates and illuminates artworks on their own terms and those of their era. It uncovers the great richness of Lane’s work and transforms our experience of it.”—Kim Orcutt Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide

“[Lovell] charts new territory in this volume, providing an insightful complement to existing Lane studies and an invitation to subsequent scholars to tell fresh stories.”—Katherine Manthorne Panorama

“Lovell’s attention to the telling details of Lane’s artworks simultaneously provides an appreciation of his alignment with the artisanal values of his community and champions a particular type of art history. The ‘thick description’ of her approach leaves virtually no historical or cultural context of Lane’s paintings unexplored, with great benefit to the reader since her care encourages us to look at the work with fresh eyes.”—Maura Lyons caa.reviews

“Lovell spent many years in researching, studying, and synthesizing all of this material, and she has not only reached an extremely high level of scholarship, but has also created a paradigm for the way we should reexamine the art which we have grown to accept and understand in traditional and more limited ways. This book would be of tremendous value for readers wanting a fresh perspective on American art and culture.”—David M. Sokol Journal of American Culture

“Painting the Inhabited Landscape is an American art history that in its depth of research and its absolute assurance in method and goals matches or surpasses anything done by any global modernist art historian today. It is a significant contribution to the study of nineteenth-century world history in visual and material studies, and will be of interest to anyone looking at the formation of global modernism, technologies, and capital markets.”—Bruce Robertson, coauthor of Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction

“Painting the Inhabited Landscape is by far the most insightful study of Lane and his art to date. Margaretta Lovell's close examination of Lane’s life, art, and the historical contexts within which he worked represents not only a quantum leap for our understanding of Lane and his world but also a new standard of scholarship for the field of American art.”—Alan Wallach, author of Exhibiting Contradiction: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States