Dream Painting

Fitz Henry Lane's only painting of a purely imaginary subject, Dream Painting captures the image of a wrecked ship that came to the artist in a dream. The dismasted, grounded ship, a merchant brig, is stranded on a rocky shore, seawater draining through small punctures in its hull near the bow. In the background, the pounding surf, a remnant of the violent storm that brought the ship to its present state, contrasts with the pastel-tinted misty sky, which is suffused with delicate light as storm clouds retreat toward the horizon. The scene is eerily deserted, the largely intact hull at the mercy of natural elements. Lane described his dream vision as vivid, beautiful, and gorgeously colored. In Dream Painting, however, the fairyland beauty of the sky and delicacy of detail only heighten the sense of haunted melancholy as the ship seems passively to await an inexorable fate.

Lane had specialized in portraying coastal settings and ships since the beginning of his career as a painter, in the early 1840s. In the next decade, however, his maritime subjects increasingly served as vehicles for emotionally expressive light and color. With its wrecked vessel, haunted mood, and air of abandonment, Dream Painting anticipates the late Brace's Rock series of paintings, notably the Terra Foundation's Brace's Rock, Brace's Cove (TF 1999.83) of 1864. The visionary quality of these paintings suggests the artist's awareness of contemporary spiritualist movements that regarded dreams and ecstatic visions as agents of divine revelation or expressions of deep psychological states. Dream Painting is one of many attempts by nineteenth-century American artists to record such inspired imaginings.

Collection Cameo, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, September 2000.

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D'une colonie à une collection: le Musée d'Art Américain Giverny fête ses dix ans (From a Colony to a Collection: Celebrating the Tenth Anniversary of the Musée d'Art Américain Giverny), Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France (organizer). Venue: Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France, March 30–June 16, 2002.

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