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, impotent 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 impotent and 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.

Abandoned vessels appeared occasionally in Lane's earlier work as part of his effort to accurately represent New England harbor life. In the 1850s, however, the popularity of the motif among American artists generally signaled the renewed potency of this traditional symbol of the frailty of worldly endeavors and aspirations. In the decades surrounding the Civil War, the endangered Union was often represented allegorically as a vessel foundering in stormy seas, cast adrift, or broken or stranded on a rocky shore, as in Dream Painting. For Lane, this meaning of the wrecked boat may have been layered onto another, more localized and personal signification: the decline of New England's fishing and shipping industries, and the associated traditional ways of life to which Lane had dedicated his art, with the advent of rail transport and tourism.

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

On Process: Studio Themes, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, January 13–March 4, 2001.

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.

Wilmerding, John. Fitz Hugh Lane, 1804–1865: American Marine Painter. Salem, Massachusetts: Essex Institute, 1964. No. 317, pp. 31-32.

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American Paintings III 1985. New York: Berry-Hill Galleries, Inc., 1985. Text p. 28; ill. p. 29 (color).

Christie's, New York, New York (Sale 6838, May 25, 1989): lot 41. Text p. 52; ill. lot 41, p. 53.

Miller, David C. "The Iconology of Wrecked or Stranded Boats in Mid to Late Nineteenth-Century American Culture." American Iconology: New Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Text p. 196; ill. fig. 9.7 (black & white).

Sikkema, Scott. Dream Painting, Fitz Hugh Lane. Collection Cameo sheet, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, September 2000. Ill. (color).

Kennedy, Elizabeth. "The Terra Museum of American Art." American Art Review (December 2002): 126–41. Text pp. 131–32.

Craig, James A. Fitz H. Lane: An Artist's Voyage through Nineteenth-Century America. Charleston, South Carolina: The History Press, 2006. Text p. 158.