Wilmerding went on to teach at Dartmouth and Princeton. He was a curator and deputy director at Washington’s National Gallery of Art. His 1971 Fitz Hugh Lane (Praeger) has been the standard monograph on the artist; he also organized the catalogue for the 1988 Lane survey exhibit at the National Gallery and the Museum of Fine Arts. He contributed books on Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and numerous other American artists. He’s now a leading adviser to Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton, who’s been buying up 19th-century American masterpieces for a planned museum in Arkansas.
“Fitz Henry Lane & Mary Blood Mellen” is an intriguing scholarly exhibit that hangs Lane’s seascapes and Mellen’s copies side by side. It opens with Clipper Ship “Sweepstakes” (1853), one of two known Lane paintings signed “Fitz Henry Lane.” Wilmerding may have inherited the “Hugh” mistake, but he didn’t question it when he was asked to examine this canvas and its signature in 1993. He said he believed the painting was by Lane with “no additional hands at work,” and that Lane’s close friend (and executor of his estate) Joseph Stevens or someone else might have signed it “Fitz Henry.” It’s not a convincing explanation: we were asked to believe that, first, that a close friend “signed” the painting, and, second, that this friend couldn’t even get the artist’s name right.
Wilmerding declined to speak to me on this matter, but he did answer some questions via letter. He response: “When I first looked at the signature on the Sweepstakes, I said it was unmistakably in Lane’s hand, but being such an anomaly, I had no explanation for it (not thinking of the obvious!).”
Lane (1804–1865) was an uneven artist, but at his best he painted bustling harbors, rocky shores, and great open skies suffused with a curious stillness, like frozen memories. What stands out is his attention to the way light breaks through clouds and falls on sails and waves. The Western Shore with Norman’s Woe (circa 1862) is an arrestingly calm depiction of a glassy smooth low tide lapping against a curve of rocky Gloucester beach under pink fluffy clouds. Mary Blood Mellen (1819–1886) struggles to keep up. Their differences are palpable in the Cape Ann show. Lane is generally crisper, more specific. Mellen is mushier and softer; her paint tends to be a bit thicker. His rigging is precise; hers is suggested. His boats float convincingly in the water; hers sit unnaturally high. Some of the pairings — like a rough Lane oil sketch of a Gloucester island next to Mellen’s finished painting — exaggerate Lane’s weaknesses and Mellen’s strengths.
