Catalog entry

Commentary

This painting from 1848 is an early example of Lane's paring down the detail within a scene and focusing on the light and the sky. Annisquam Marshes near Gloucester, Massachusetts, 1848 (inv. 70)  was done during the same years as his great Gloucester Inner Harbor views with their almost overwhelming detail of waterfront activity compressed against a background of vessels and buildings ringing the harbor. The intense activity of those scenes is in direct contrast to the twilight serenity of this view, as if Lane needed to exhale and find a more contemplative moment.

To achieve this view, Lane went to West Gloucester, only a few miles to the northwest of Gloucester Harbor but otherwise a world away—an agrarian landscape of granite, woodlands, and fields surrounded by salt marshes. This location has been misidentified twice in the painting titles: first as Mount Desert Island; then as Annisquam, just a few miles down the coast from Lane’s actual viewpoint.

Here, Lane is looking west along Concord Street from a high point over the Chebacco River (now called the Essex River). The river is a tidal estuary that flows out of the town of Essex (then Chebacco) to Ipswich Bay through a large network of salt marshes running all the way through Ipswich to Newburyport.

The sun has just set over Choate Island (Hog Island), which lies just behind Crane Beach. The island is the high point in the distance that dominates the marsh views. This painting is taken from a drawing titled Chebacco River, etc., from West Parish of Gloucester, 1850s (inv. 155) that was carefully ruled off for transfer to canvas, a common practice in Lane's later drawings but somewhat unusual for works from the 1840s.

In the drawing, Lane has carefully delineated the foreground ledge, stone walls, and sloping fields, using an unusually high horizon line, and he has de-emphasized the distant islands. In the painting he has done just the opposite. The horizon line is below the halfway line and the foreground detail is lost in shadow as the eye is overtaken by the brilliant afterglow of the sunset. Look carefully and you will see two cows on the hillside to the right and the roof of a small house in the lower left. They are incidental to the glow of the sky and its reflection on the full tide filling the salt marshes below.

Lane did very few paintings in West Gloucester that we know of: two of Coffin’s Beach (Coffin's Beach at Sunset, c.1862 (inv. 31) and View of Coffin's Beach, 1862 (inv. 41)) and another lost work of Freeman’s encampment at the Loaf, both from the 1860s. The defining feature of West Gloucester is its salt marshes, a subject made famous by Lane’s younger contemporary Martin Johnson Heade, who was painting the salt marshes just north of this spot, beginning in the late 1850s. The relative emptiness of this scene and the dramatic light reflecting off the marshes is reminiscent of Heade’s work. However, Lane painted this a full ten years before Heade’s earliest marsh paintings.  

– Sam Holdsworth

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