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Academic Seminars

Fitz Henry Lane: Time, Memory, Canvas, and Lumber in Antebellum New England

Margaretta Lovell

Thursday, April 24, 2008, at 4:30 p.m.
Class of '47 Room, Homer Babbidge Library
University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut

PRÉCIS: One of New England.s most enigmatic and eccentric nineteenth-century artists, Fitz Henry Lane has, since the mid-twentieth century been celebrated as a master of light and of painterly Transcendentalism, betraying the High Modernist moment at which his oeuvre was rediscovered. Lane's contemporaries, on the other hand, understood him to be painting the economic life of coastal New England based on extraction industries — fish, granite, and lumber. His neighbors and patrons inhabited a rocky shore with a long reach.Surinam, Puerto Rico, California lurk within his canvases depicting Gloucester and Maine. For them his works celebrated capital and technology and evoked community, memory, and history. Critically, however, these canvases also give us insight into the development of the new economy of looking, that is, tourism.

Directions: Parking is available in the UConn South Parking Garage for a fee. The Class of '47 Room is on the main floor of the Homer Babbidge Library. The rear entrance to the library (from the terrace) opens to a small alcove; the Class of '47 Room straight ahead and Bookworms Café is around the corner to your left.

The Class of '47 Room will open at 4:00 p.m. for a reception preceding the seminar. Afterwards, the group will go out for a dutch-treat dinner at a nearby restaurant. Please indicate your plans, especially if you wish to stay for dinner, by sending the completed form to Nancy Comarella to arrive at the university (or e-mail (nancy.comarella[at]uconn.edu) on or before April 16.