View of Boston Harbor

George Curtis’s View of Boston Harbor presents an expansive view, bathed in bright, diffused light, of a quiet, sheltered harbor under a delicately tinted sky. The glassy water, filled with a variety of ships, is seen from a shore of low mud flats interspersed with shallow pools and scattered boulders. Two beached craft, one a skeletal hulk, along with abandoned spars and an anchor still attached to one of the boats, infuse the scene with a touch of melancholy relieved by the presence of three figures. A man, his red vest lending an unusual note of strong color to the otherwise softly muted composition, is seated on the raked edge of the disused rowboat whose diagonal placement directs the gaze into the distance. Two more figures, one bent over the ground with a basket at his side, further animate the shoreline.

View of Boston Harbor is said to be a view southwards from the low-lying shore of East Boston (now the site of Logan International Airport), with Governor's Island, topped by Fort Winthrop, in the center and the hills of Milton, Massachusetts, pale blue in the distance beyond. Topographical exactitude is subordinated, however, to such formal concerns as the balanced interplay of near and far objects and the thrust of vertical rigging against the flat surface of the water. The low horizon, emphatically horizontal format, pervasive calm, and soft, diffused light of Curtis's painting all are hallmarks of a mode of landscape painting, dubbed luminism by scholars, that flourished in coastal New England between the 1850s and the 1870s. As an established Boston-based marine painter, Curtis was certainly aware of examples by artists such as Fitz Henry Lane, the earliest exponent of this style, whose Gloucester Harbor (TF 1993.21) is also in the Terra Foundation collection. The largest easel painting and one of the most complex compositions Curtis is known to have made, View of Boston Harbor embodies the artist's fullest engagement with a luminist approach in subject, style, and mood.

Although undated, View of Boston Harbor may well have been painted in the 1860s, when many American artists inserted oblique references to the Civil War into subject matter ostensibly remote from the conflict. Among marine and coastal painters of the time, the motif of the beached and broken boat was clearly understood as a symbol of the wrecked ship of state. Placed within a landscape otherwise suffused with calm stillness, as in Curtis’s painting, these objects take on an added poignancy. In this image, they further contrast with the proud, fully-rigged vessels floating in the harbor. Signifiers of redemptive sacrifice, the two crosses “accidentally” formed by the abandoned anchor and the mast and spar on the beach subtly reconcile the evocation of wrenching national trauma and the peaceful serenity of the scene.

Two Hundred Years of American Painting from Private Collections, Terra Museum of American Art, Evanston, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Terra Museum of American Art, Evanston, Illinois, June 25–September 2, 1983, no. 25.

George Curtis: Coming to Light, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts (organizer). Venue: Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, November 18, 1993–June 1994.

Rivières et rivages: les artistes américains, 1850–1900 (Waves and Waterways: American Perspectives, 1850–1900), Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France (organizer). Venue: Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France, April 1–October 31, 2000. [exh. cat.]

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.

La Scène américaine, 1860–1930 (Americans at Home, 1860–1930), Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, Giverny, France (organizer). Venues: Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, Giverny, France, July 10–October 30, 2005.

La Scène américaine, 1860–1930 (Americans at Home, 1860–1930), Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, Giverny, France (organizer). Venues: Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, Giverny, France, April 1–October 29, 2006.

"George Curtis: Coming to Light." Peabody Essex Museum Collections 129:4 (October 1993). Text pp. 387, 389; pl. 24 (color).

Cash, Sarah. Ominous Hush: The Thunderstorm Paintings of Martin Johnson Heade. (exh. cat., Amon Carter Museum). Fort Worth, Texas: Amon Carter Museum, 1994. Text p. 48; fig. 25, p. 49 (black & white).