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Stage Fort across Gloucester Harbor

1862
On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 756
Lane returned to his native Gloucester from Boston in 1848. His works of the 1850s and 1860s are successively purged of genre and topographical elements, becoming increasingly spare and essential. By 1862, Lane had engineered a seamless, self-effacing style, possibly influenced by the works of Martin Johnson Heade. Stage Fort, once the site of military fortifications, sits on an arching land form used to lead the viewer's eye into the glowing, lucid, and almost eerily still distance. Despite the disjuncture between the virtually surreal, meticulously painted foreground and the sheer plane of water near the horizon, this work marks the transition to Lane's final, taut, elemental style. The painting's disquieting stasis, even with its hopeful pink and golden glow, creates a hermetic, elegiac mood found in many of Lane's late works.

Artwork Details

Object Information
  • Title: Stage Fort across Gloucester Harbor
  • Artist: Fitz Henry Lane (formerly Fitz Hugh Lane) (1804–1865)
  • Date: 1862
  • Culture: American
  • Medium: Oil on canvas
  • Dimensions: 38 x 60 in. (96.5 x 152.4 cm)
  • Credit Line: Purchase, Rogers and Fletcher Funds, Erving and Joyce Wolf Fund, Raymond J. Horowitz Gift, Bequest of Richard De Wolfe Brixey, by exchange, and John Osgood and Elizabeth Amis Cameron Blanchard Memorial Fund, 1978
  • Object Number: 1978.203
  • Curatorial Department: The American Wing

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The Golden State Entering New York Harbor, Fitz Henry Lane (formerly Fitz Hugh Lane) American, Oil on canvas, American
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Fitz Henry Lane (formerly Fitz Hugh Lane)
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Ernesta (Child with Nurse), Cecilia Beaux American, Oil on canvas, American
Ernesta (Child with Nurse)
Cecilia Beaux
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The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak, Albert Bierstadt American, Oil on canvas, American
The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak
Albert Bierstadt
1863
Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, George Caleb Bingham American, Oil on canvas, American
Fur Traders Descending the Missouri
George Caleb Bingham
1845
At the Seaside, William Merritt Chase American, Oil on canvas, American
At the Seaside
William Merritt Chase
ca. 1892

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