Lighthouse at Camden, Maine

On view in the American Art before 1900 galleries

Commercial shipping played a critical role in the development of the American economy and became a popular subject in art and literature. Fitz Henry Lane rendered the Camden Harbor at sunset, uniting topographic precision with spectacular atmospheric effects. Made the same year that Herman Melville’s whaling novel Moby Dick was published, the paint­ing shows a schooner filled with lumber sailing past Negro Island, where many free African Americans lived. As Maine gradually opened to commerce and tourism before the Civil War, the construction of nu­merous lighthouses aided coastal navigation.