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Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:04] We’re in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, looking at Fitz Henry Lane’s “Owl’s Head, Penobscot Bay, Maine.” This is a place that Lane spent a good deal of time, and characteristic of this American artist, sometimes called a Luminist, we have this wonderfully quiet, still moment.
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:23] That’s what we mean by the term “Luminism.” Landscape paintings by a number of American painters, where we have a sense of calm and tranquillity, views of water, a quality of light that allows each element of the landscape to stand out in perfect clarity, but there’s an overall mood of contemplativeness and peacefulness.
Dr. Zucker: [0:47] It is so typical of American art, especially American marine painting. This is dawn. We can see the peach sky in the background, and the water is still calm. The winds of the day have not started.
[0:59] The ship in the background just put up its sails and is trying to catch whatever breeze is just beginning. We look out on this space almost through the gaze of the fisherman we see in the lower left of the canvas.
Dr. Harris: [1:13] This is very much a Romantic landscape, one that looks back to the traditions of Romanticism. We might think about Caspar David Friedrich and the way he uses figures looking out to sea with their backs to us.
[1:25] Or we might even think about John Constable in England, painting his native landscape of the Stour Valley and that sense of love of his native landscape. I think that we have that here with Lane.
Dr. Zucker: [1:39] There’s a way that light is able to take the careful rendering, the veracity that all this detail and clarity offers us, but still render a painting that is largely poetic.
[1:51] That’s one of the issues that is most central to Luminism, that even with this high-pitched specificity, there’s still room for a painting that is ultimately one that is emotional, that is almost transcendental.
Dr. Harris: [2:05] I think that sense of emotion comes through because of the lack of narrative incident. We’re looking at a seascape, but we don’t see fishermen busy with activities. We don’t see ships coming in and unloading cargo or other kinds of narrative scenes that we might expect in a harbor.
Dr. Zucker: [2:23] Light is the main protagonist, not the human occupation of the space.
Dr. Harris: [2:27] In a way, for me, the main protagonist is the house that we see on that tiny little island and that — as you said — peach-colored light that we all know so well from looking at the water in the early morning. We’re really transported to this place. I can almost hear the water lapping at the shore.
Dr. Zucker: [2:48] This painting invites a kind of careful, quiet contemplation.
Dr. Harris: [2:52] It’s very different from other American landscape painting that we might think of by Albert Bierstadt or Frederic Church that’s really grand and operatic and sublime, and says something big. Those paintings are often very large and depict sublime scenes like the Rocky Mountains or Niagara Falls. But here, this humble, quiet scene, a different strain in American landscape painting.
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