loading 
Fitz Henry Lane
HISTORICAL ARCHIVE • CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ • EDUCATIONAL RESOURCE
An online project under the direction of the CAPE ANN MUSEUM
An online project under the direction of the CAPE ANN MUSEUM
Catalog entry
inv. 681
View of Gloucester
The Old Fort
1856 [dimensions unknown]
|
Related Work in the Catalog
Provenance (Information known to date; research ongoing.)
the Artist, Gloucester, Mass.
City of Gloucester, Mass., 1865
Exhibition History
No known exhibitions.Published References
Wilmerding, John. Fitz Henry Lane. Gloucester, MA: Cape Ann Historical Association, 2005. Reprint of Fitz Hugh Lane, by John Wilmerding. New York: Praeger, 1971. Includes new information regarding the artist's name., pp.69, 77-78, View of Gloucester.
Commentary
It is usually assumed that most of Lane’s paintings show the landscape exactly as it appeared at the time he sketched it. There are at least a few works in which he deliberately painted a landscape that had vanished, however, for example, Town Parish, 1863 (inv. 127). A painting of the townscape of Gloucester, unfortunately destroyed in the large Gloucester fire of 1869, was an example of one of these nostalgic works.
By 1860 the painting was on exhibition at the Gloucester Bank. The work is described as showing the Fort at the center of town. In the 1840s the revolutionary Fort was in disrepair, although the land around it was being used for flakeyards. During the next decade, as Erik Ronnberg has documented, George H. Rogers and others developed the area. A later newspaper account of this painting relates it to Lane's lithograph of the period View of Gloucester, 1859 (inv. 446). Some idea of the appearance of the Old Fort can be gleaned from The Old Fort and Ten Pound Island, Gloucester, 1850s (inv. 28) and The Old Fort and Ten Pound Island, Gloucester, 1850s (inv. 30).
In 1862 a Cape Ann Advertiser article noted, “The improvements at this point during the last fifteen years have left no traces of its former appearance, almost every landmark having been obliterated. A very good idea of the place as it then appeared may be obtained from the painting of Fitz H. Lane, Esq., now on exhibition at the Reading Room under the Gloucester Bank.”
Evidently the painting remained in the Reading Room for the next several years, and Lane left it to the city in his will. “I give to the inhabitants of the town of Gloucester, the picture of the old fort, to be kept as a memento of one of the localities of olden time the said picture now hanging in the reading room under the Gloucester bank and to be there kept until the town of Gloucester shall furnish a suitable and safe place to hang it.” It was moved to the City Hall after that structure was completed in 1867 and destroyed in the fire less than two years later.
– Melissa Geisler Trafton