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Spanierman Gallery, LLC, is pleased to announce the opening on October 4, 2007 of Fitz Henry Lane and Mary Blood Mellen: Old Mysteries and New Discoveries. Organized in partnership with the Cape Ann Historical Museum and curated by John Wilmerding, this exhibition brings together for the first time the work of nineteenth-century America’s master Luminist and marine painter and his exceedingly talented student, follower, and sometime collaborator. The nearly fifty paintings included illuminate the subtle and complex artistic relationship between the two by offering a comparative study of related works hung side by side. Twelve paintings are on loan from the Cape Ann Historical Museum, which holds the largest collection of Lane’s work; the others have been generously lent by institutions and private collectors.
Accompanying the exhibition is a catalogue by Wilmerding, considering the questions and paradoxes with respect to Lane’s identities, his relationship with some of the leading figures in the Transcendentalist movement, the ways in which Lane translated his subjects from nature into art, and his association with Mellen. The catalogue also presents the first chronology of Mary Mellen, compiled by Gloucester archivist Stephanie Buck, correcting many errors associated previously with her biography.
Together the exhibition and catalogue are intended to invoke an interactive process between the viewer and the art, while also providing opportunities for further investigation, including the extent of the artists’ collaboration and the degree to which Mellen developed as an independent artist. Says Wilmerding: “We have matched up her versions of subjects with Lane’s, but until we get the pictures up side by side we won’t have all the answers. That’s one of the purposes of the show,” Wilmerding continues, “to help clarify Lane’s art while also bringing to light Mellen’s particular style.”
Born Nathaniel Rogers Lane, the artist changed his name when he was twenty-seven to Fitz Henry Lane. By the early twentieth century, he had mistakenly become known as Fitz “Hugh” Lane, until a correction to his name was made in 2005 through the efforts of three Gloucester archivists. Lent by the Museum of the City of New York, the exhibition includes one of the only two known paintings signed “Fitz Henry Lane,” a view of the Clipper Ship “Sweepstakes,” painted in 1853. Marked by a precise treatment of forms, spatial geometric clarity, a reductive compositional simplicity, and a sensitivity to nuances of light and atmosphere, other works in the show by Lane and Mellen capture a frozen, serene vision of Gloucester’s harbors and shores, a sense of the extreme quietude of the sparsely settled Maine coast, and the melancholic feeling of Ten Pound Island in Gloucester Harbor, silhouetted against sunsets of varying intensities of light. A group of images of open seas portraying ships wrestling in the turbulence of squalls reveal the artists’ focus on conveying the strength of hard, surging waves, often accompanied by fitful skies, in which light breaks forcibly through heavy storm clouds. In a section of moonlit works, Mellen’s images do not closely follow Lane’s, but both artists explore the romantic effect of moonlight penetrating darkly shrouded rocks, land, and water. Among Lane’s last works are his minimalist, carefully balanced views of Brace’s Rock at low tide, which intimate a sense of isolation and time ebbing away in the presence of dark boulders and shorelines broken only by solitary wrecked hulls.
The largest gathering thus far of work by Mellen, this exhibition serves as the first major survey of her art, offering many new insights into her art and career. The exhibition is also the first to feature Lane’s work since 1988, when the National Gallery of Art held Paintings by Fitz Hugh Lane. The show captures an indelible record of maritime New England unmatched by the works of other artists of the era, expressing the poetic beauty of these familiar places through a masterful understanding of form and light.
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