fitz henry lane Archives - New England Historical Society

Fitz Henry Lane was a disabled sailmaker’s son from Gloucester, Mass., who painted signs and fire screens and seascapes on canvas. Those paintings sold for $100 apiece, $500 at most.

Fishing Party by Fitz Henry Lane

Frederic Church, two decades younger, was one of the most celebrated artists of his day. He painted monumental scenes of nature, wild, rugged, uninhabited landscapes. His paintings sold for $5,000 and as much as $10,000.

Twilight in the Wilderness, by Frederic Church

Lane and Church both painted coastal Maine, accessible to mid-19^th century landscape artists. They came to Mount Desert Island to capture the grandeur of nature on canvas for their wealthy patrons.

Church painted the Maine his patrons wanted to see— an untamed wilderness, according to. Margaret Markle Lovell, author of Painting the Inhabited Landscape: Fitz H. Lane and the Global Reach of Antebellum America. So did the other painters in Church’s milieu – the Hudson River School of Art.

The image of raw, uninhabited nature “was a powerful fiction in the making and selling of pictures,” said Lovell, in a talk sponsored by the Farnsworth Art Museum in September 2023

Lane, however, went in a different direction. He saw plenty of people along the coast and plenty of commercial activity. As a Gloucester native, he knew thousands of men made their living clearcutting that untamed landscape and fishing that empty marinescape. Hundreds of humble schooners made as many as 17 trips a year hauling lumber, hay and granite. Hundreds more made several trips a year to fish for cod in the Grand and Georges Banks.

Lumber Schooners at Evening on Penobscot Bay, 1863

So it’s no surprise that Lane’s painting of Mount Desert Island includes a coasting schooner hauling lumber from the Maine woods.

These days Fitz Henry Lane’s paintings sell for more than Church’s. His Manchester Harbor (with boats and people) sold for $5.5 million in 2004. (See it here.) Church’s record currently stands at $3.2 million for Twilight in the Wilderness, sold in 2011.

Here are seven more fun facts about Fitz Henry Lane.

1. For the longest time no one figured out his name was Fitz Henry Lane.

He was born Nathaniel Rogers Lane in 1804, but in 1831 had his name legally changed. According to the National Gallery of Art, his middle name began to appear as “Hugh,” and he was widely known as Fitz Hugh Lane. Then archival research in 2004-2005 made it clear his name was Fitz Henry Lane. Why he changed it remains a mystery.

Fitz Henry Lane

2. Many of the Gloucester scenes he painted can be experienced today.

The artist’s house in Gloucester

Lane didn’t have an international reputation, like Church. Instead, he had local fame. Many Cape Ann residents commissioned his works and passed them down through the generations. Local families then donated the paintings to the Cape Ann Museum along with furnishings. As the Museum points out, “much of Gloucester’s historic waterfront and many of the natural vistas and landmarks that Lane painted have been preserved and can be re-experienced today.” His stone house still overlooks the harbor.

Braces Rock in Gloucester

3. Fitz Henry Lane paintings aren’t just pretty landscapes.

Castine from Fort George

They’re a record of maritime commerce in the northeast during the mid-19^th century. Lane knew what ships carried, where they came from and where they were headed. And he understood where people fit into the coastal economy.

Lovell, for example, pointed out that his painting Castine From Fort George depicts the Maine town as a place of serene prosperity. It was, in fact, the richest town in Maine at the time. In the foreground, men cut hay, which would feed the oxen that hauled logs from the lumber camps. Lane also included three women, two Euro-Americans buying a basket from a Penobscot. The native American baskets were much prized and used. Lane would have known how the Penobscots fit into the local economy from his experience with them in Gloucester and on his visits to Castine, Lovell said.

Maritime historians find his work helpful in their research, according to Erik Ronnberg, Jr., maritime curator at the Cape Ann Museum.

4. Many of his patrons made their money through shipping.

Winged Arrow and Southern Cross, clipper ships used in the China and California trade

People who’d acquired great wealth through maritime trade wanted to see ships and warehouses, not empty landscapes. Robert Bennet Forbes, for example, got rich as a sea captain in the China trade. He commissioned Lane to paint the frontispiece for a book he wrote. In it, Forbes had described a 17-day voyage he took to Ireland on a ship carrying food to famine victims.

Sidney Mason, a Gloucester native who made it rich in shipping, bought several Lane paintings. Mason has earned credit for modernizing Puerto Rico, and he commissioned Lane to paint a series of seascapes from his career, including Gloucester, San Juan and New York.

Charlotte Cushman proved the exception. She was not a shipping merchant but a cross-dressing actress quite famous in her day. She bought two Fitz Henry Lane paintings. But then she did take them on a ship to Europe, according to a local newspaper.

5. Fitz Henry Lane once painted himself as a ragged schooner.

Salem Harbor. Lane’s schooner is to the left of the clipper ship.

In his painting Salem Harbor he depicts a magnificent clipper ship with every snow-white sail unfurled. Nearby floats a small schooner, a humble schooner like the thousands that hauled lumber and granite from Canada and Maine to Boston and New York. His brownish, discolored sails bear his initials in red. One wonders: Does the clipper ship represent Frederic Church?

6. Eating a poisonous weed caused his lameness.

A Gloucester minister (and a female one at that) named Ada C. Bowles published her memories of Fitz Henry Lane. In it, she wrote, “As understood, his disablement was the result of eating, as a boy, of the poisonous weed, ‘Apple-of-Peru,’ so called in my childhood, and always associated with the tragedy of the artist’s life. …[It] is well known now as Thorn-apple (Datura Stramonium) from which children are still warned, in the name of the mischief which it brought upon Gloucester’s most famous artist.”

Or maybe he contracted polio.

Becalmed off Halfway Rock

Bowles, who took lessons from Lane, credits his “crippled condition” for his devotion to his art. Perhaps she had a point. Historians view his paintings as astonishingly detailed and accurate. He knew all kinds of vessels, their size and shape, the length of their masts and their complex rigging systems.

7. He was rediscovered by a colorful opera singer who married a rich, much older woman.

Owl’s Head, acquired by Maxim Karolik

After Lane died, the French Impressionists eclipsed him in popularity. Collectors and critics forgot all about him, until Maxim Karolik came along. Karolk, a Russian-Jewish opera singer, married a wealthy Brahmin, Caroline Codman, twice his age. The couple then went into an art collecting frenzy. They specialized in American art, which they donated to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. After Caroline died in 1948, Maxim continued to collect. He donated more than a dozen Fitz Henry Lane paintings to the museum.

Image: Fitz Henry Lane House By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9587588

Martha Codman in 1928 shocked and titillated East Coast high society when she married an immigrant Jewish opera singer, Maxim Karolik.

She was 70. He was 35.

Moreover, she came from several old, old, wealthy New England families. He didn’t even pretend to. He called himself “Maximum Karolik, but not at minimum prices.”

Martha Codman Karolik in 1906

He once wore a mink-lined overcoat to the exclusive Somerset Club in Boston. His host told him gentlemen don’t wear furs. He replied, “Who ever accused me of being a gentleman? I am a tenor!”

But with his wife and, later, alone, he collected thousands of pieces of paintings, drawings. sculpture, portraits, silver, furniture, prints, engravings, and donated it all to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

And as author Carol Troyen pointed out, Maxim Karolik brought more distinction to the Codman family than the family itself had done in 200 years.

Martha Codman Karolik

Martha Codman was born July 24, 1858, the only surviving child of John Amory Codman and Martha Rogers. Martha’s ancestry included a collection of Brahmin names: Derby, Crowninshield, Pickman, Amory and Codman.

Elias Haskett Derby

Her mother’s great-grandfather, Elias Haskett Derby, was a Salem shipping merchant and one of the richest men in America. Her father, John Amory Codman, was a wealthy artist from the storied Amory and Codman families. He had a mistress, Violet Kimball, who he visited on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays for 14 years — at least according to her love letters, which provoked much amusement when read out loud in court.

Proper New England ladies were supposed to keep their names out of the newspaper except at birth, death and marriage. Martha Codman and her mother ignored that rule in a big way.

Squam Lake, New Hampshire, by John Amory Codman, 1848

John Amory Codman died in 1886 and left an estate worth an estimated $400,000. It included a hefty bequest to Mrs. Kimball. The will was challenged by Martha and her mother (“La Femme Terrible,” according to Mrs. Kimball). The case made newspaper headlines for several years. Finally, the ladies settled, giving Violet Kimball $15,000.

Martha’s mother already had wealth of her own, including industrial stocks and large real estate holdings in Boston and Newport. Martha Codman lived with her mother until she was nearly 50. They both had an interest in their family history, and they traveled throughout Europe together collecting family records. Together they kept up an active social life among the elite in Boston, Newport and Washington, D.C.

Martha Codman, On Her Own

La Femme Terrible died in 1905. Martha Codman, then one of the richest women in America, began to build mansions – the Codman-Davis in Washington, D.C., and then Berkeley Villa (now Bellevue) in Newport R.I.

Codman-Davis House in Washington, D.C. (now the Thai Ambassador’s residence)

She hired her cousin, society decorator Ogden Codman, to design both.

In 1927, she invited Maxim Karolik to sing at a gathering in Washington.

Singing Waiter

Maxim Karolik had arrived in the United States five years earlier with few possessions but his charm and his voice. Born in Russia on Nov. 21, 1893, he studied opera at the Petrograd Grand Opera.

He made a living performing at evening entertainments – kind of a “singing waiter,” according to Troyen.

After that concert in Washington, Martha invited him to spend the summer at her Newport house, filled with silver, heirlooms and 20 Siamese cats. She asked him to join her on a trip to Europe. He said yes. Then she asked him to marry her. He said yes to that, too.

They married on the French Riviera. The December-May union of a Brahmin heiress and Russian Jewish émigré horrified her relatives. They insisted she stay in Europe for a year with “the singing bridegroom.”

Maxim Karolik

Martha wrote to her aunt, the one relative who sent her a wedding gift, that Maxim was a gentleman with a wonderful mind, a lovely disposition and a splendid voice.

“Of course, I know what people will say, but I am determined not to pay any attention to that, but get all the happiness and pleasure out of what remains to me of life,” she wrote her aunt.

Collecting

Martha already had an interest in 18^th century art. She had already inherited exquisite early American furniture, silver and paintings, but she needed more to furnish her mansions. She bought other heirlooms from family members with little interest in them.

Maxim encouraged her to collect 18^th century art beyond her family treasures. In 1935, they decided to form the M & M Karolik 18th century American arts collection at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

It debuted on Dec. 2, 1941, five days before Pearl Harbor. The New York Sun reported the crowd “panted and sweated and fainted and exclaimed aloud at the beauty revealed.”

To explain the collection, Karolik penned an Atlantic Monthly essay in 1942, as much about his marriage as about the 18^th century art.

“The concept that all men are born equal was to the men of 1776 no mere phrase…it implied a deep faith in the common man,” he wrote. Back then, wrote Karolik, the artist and the merchant stood on an equal footing with the soldier and the statesman. Karolik – no doubt thinking of himself and Martha – noted that Benjamin Franklin was friends with clockmaker Edward Duffield, George Washington was friends with Boston cabinetmaker Benjamin Frothingham and Thomas Jefferson was friends with Benjamin Randolph, the Philadelphia cabinetmaker who made the desk on which he wrote the Declaration of Independence. They acknowledged an “aristocracy of mind and spirit,” he wrote.

Phase II

The Karoliks then moved on to the 19^th century. Their first collection represented the fine and decorative arts of the urban, colonial elite. The second, more middlebrow collection, included art that didn’t cost a whole lot.

They decided to avoid brand-name painters, and instead to focus on art they liked. “Our motto is, ‘Tell me if the painting is good, and I won’t care who the painter is’,” Maxim liked to say.

Salem Harbor by Fitz Henry Lane

Much 19^th century art had fallen out of favor by collectors. Works by such artists as Eastman Johnson, Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Cole were stored in attics and could be picked up for a song. Martha, getting on in years, let Maxim do much of the legwork.

Sunlight and Shadow: Newbury Marshes by Martin Johnson Heade. National Gallery of Art.

Martha died at 89 on April 21, 1948. Maxim continued to shower the museum with forgotten paintings from the Hudson River school. He also discovered Boston luminists Martin Johnson Heade and Fitz Henry Lane and folk art. In 1951, the M. & M. Karolik collection of American Paintings, 1815-1865 went on exhibit.

Meditation by the Sea, an American folk art oil painting by an unknown artist from the early 1860s. Karolik Collection, MFA.

After Martha Codman Karolik

Karolik loved an audience and spent a great deal of time in the museum. The museum’s director, Perry Rathbone had to keep Maxim’s ego “in a permanently polished condition,” wrote Rathbone’s daughter.

Rathbone made Karolik an honorary curator, which meant he spent every weekday from nine to five in the museum. Wagging his forefinger, he made pronouncements to visitors and remined Rathbone of the collection’s greatness. Rathbone once wrote that Maxim sometimes made him regret his love of American art.

Pictorial quilt: one of the few surviving quilts by Harriet Powers, considered one of the finest examples of Southern pictorial quiltmaking. Karolik collection, MFA>

In 1962, the third and final phase of the M and M Karolik collection went on exhibit, M. & M. Karolik collection of American Water Colors & Drawings including sculpture, 1800-1875.”

Maxim in the News

Time magazine reported on the event – and on Maxim:

[He] divides most of his time these days between his late wife’s summer mansion in Newport and the Ritz in Boston. At the Ritz he usually lunches alone, but every few bites he springs across the room to greet in heavily accented English some acquaintance at another table.

His “batonlike index finger” accompanies an avalanche of talk, “which is usually about Maxim Karolik,” the magazine reported. Both in Boston and Newport,

…he is like a character out of an old Russian novel—a tall, exuberant figure with a penchant for astrakhan-collared coats or pea jackets with mink collars and cuffs. “In Newport,” he says in a typical Karolik maxim, “I am prominent. In Boston, I am important.”

Maxim as an older gentleman

Maxim Karolik died at the age of 70 on Dec. 20, 1963. In the end, he and Martha gave the MFA more than 2,000 high-quality, diverse objects.

Carol Troyen, writing in American Art, summarized the impact of their generosity: “Without the M. and M. Karolik Collections, the holdings in American art of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, would compose merely an extremely fine provincial collection.”

With thanks to The Boston Raphael: A Mysterious Painting, an Embattled Museum in an Era of Change & a Daughter’s Search for the Truth by Belinda Rathbone. And Fitz Henry Lane and Maxim and Martha Karolik: A Tale of Two Love Stories, a lecture by Carol Troyen.

Images: By AgnosticPreachersKid at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17984196.

fitz henry lane

Fitz Henry Lane, The Gloucester Town Painter Who Made a Huge Comeback