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He also adopts an aerial point of view, and his emphasis on subtle tonal gradations, drawn from his experience in printmaking, gives his painting a sense of lyrical restraint.ġ856 - Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New Yorkġ859 View of the Shrewsbury River, New Jersey Unlike the Hudson River School painters such as Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Church, Lane eschews dramatic effects, favoring a subtle composition and rhythm as seen in the way the three peaks on the island lead one's gaze to the ship on the horizon. Here, one can notice the cragginess of the dead trees in the foreground and further into the scene on the next island. With the exception of the boats and a few birds, the landscape is unpopulated, thus heightening the opportunity to be in communion with nature without the distractions of others. Like most of his Maine seascapes, this work emphasizes the atmosphere and emotional effect of the coast. The artist took summer cruises in this area beginning in the late 1840s, and the vastness and wilderness of the landscape became one of his favorite subjects. The sparseness of the scene ensures the dominating effect of the sky and the water. Most prominently, Lane paints the sunset glow in the pink clouds that rise out of the island mountains reflecting in the ocean waters.

Here, Lane depicts a quiet cove along the coast of Maine where a large sailing vessel lingers at the center right edge of the canvas and a smaller boat lurks in the shadows at the left, almost as if an afterthought. Oil on canvas - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York As a result, the figures come into sharp relief, as the landscape becomes an atmospheric harmony of the river, the hazy distant forest, and the luminous sky, thus creating an examplary Luminist structure. In the middle distance to the left, submerged trees rise out of the water, creating a diagonal to the island that frames the two men on the canoe. The waters are remarkably still and reflective, as shimmering horizontal lines depict the hidden currents that break around a submerged tree limb in the foreground. The young man, leaning on the cargo in the center of the boat, is the man's son, and his clothing and the beaded medicine pouch near him reflects that he was part Native American. The older man on the right wears a Phrygian cap, a French symbol of liberty marking him as a French fur trader, and placing the image within an earlier historical period, when this part of the country was a French territory dominated by the fur trade. This painting depicts a dugout canoe, bearing two men and a black bear cub, tied to one end, as they descend the Missouri River to St. Watercolor - Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, New York The emphasis on atmospherics, the subject matter focusing on a body of water that reflects the sky and seems to flow into it, and the open composition favoring the curvilinear in its depiction of the canal and the horizon, along with the intimate scale of the canvas, made this prototypical of the Luminist landscapes that would follow over the next 20 years. The canvas is naturalistically detailed in its depictions of the horses and the boat as well as the seasonal indications such as the crimson leaves on the trees to the left and the bare saplings outlined on the hill to the right. This work employs Harvey's innovative stippling, where he placed tiny points of color adjacent to one another to create an effect of light, a technique that prefigured the Neo-Impressionist technique of Pointillism. The painting conveys a feeling of quiet serenity, as the canal takes up the foreground of the painting and draws the viewer's eye toward the low horizon where the small town of Pittsford is visible beneath the autumnal sky, but the town does not disturb the natural configurations of the land. The hill on the right is subtly illuminated by sunlight, and a number of ducks swim along the banks of the canal. On the tree-lined road along the edge of the canal, two horses are driven by a man on horseback, while at the bend in the low middle distance a boat comes into view around the curve known as King's Bend. This proto-Luminist landscape depicts the Erie Canal and focuses on the canal's quiet waters reflecting the light of the softly glowing sky.