FITZ HUGH LANE.

John Wilmerding(Chairman, Department of Art, and AssociateProfessor of Art). New York: PraegerPublishers, 1971. 203 pp. 10 color plates and101 black-and-white illustrations. $18.50.

Fifteen years ago, as I began the selecting of marines for a book that would need a lot of them, it soon became evident that specializing American artists with skills reaching beyond representational precision were few. Expert Britons had come and gone; Buttersworth was their exemplar. Salmon came at mid-career and stayed. Birch, a very young newcomer, was an American artist throughout his active life. Homer was too late for my purposes. Only Fitz Hugh Lane, among the native-born, seemed comparable. What I could find out about him had been squeezed into monographs with such titles as "Unknown American Painters of the 19th Century," and

"Forgotten Men of American Art." Both of these, dated 1947 and 1951, are listed in the bibliography of the work under review. In the latter 1950's both Lane and Salmon received some less apologetic attention, but it was not until 1962, when John Wilmerding's first piece on Lane appeared in Antiques magazine, that he began to receive serious study - not only as a superior marine painter, but also as a superior American artist who happened to specialize in marines.

The present handsomely produced book had its origins in a smaller and slimmer volume, FitzHugh Lane 1804-1865, American Marine Painter, issued in 1964 in a manner more likely to call it to the notice of those who already knew him as a marine specialist than to those who ought.to begin to look at him simply as a man of art. Having called Salmon to notice in a similarly well conceived though less well reproduced volume reviewed here two years ago, Wilmerding has rewirtten the text of his earlier Lane to about twice its former length and selected six times as many pictures for reproduction. The ten color plates are of a distinctly better quality than those in the Salmon. The writing, probably because there is more to go on, has been rescued from the urge to suppose what cannot be demonstrated. The apparatus could have been bettered. One who begins with a picture and then searches for its treatment in the text is in trouble more often than not. The logic of the sequence, at first seeming to be chronological, is not made plain enough for the kind of user who will be most frequent in the long run: the student with a particular point to discover or verify. In general, though, it is the book that would have been my salvation 15 years ago.

Where taste enters, as it must in any such volume, there is room for wholesome dispute. In the dark pre-Wilmerding era I had formed the conviction that the persisting difference between Salmon and Lane, who evidently had used the older man's work as his occasional model, showed up most strongly in the likelihood that Salmon had split his knuckles fisting canvas and that Lane had not. I did not know until I saw Wilmerding's 1964 volume that Lane had been crippled by polio as a child and had to be rowed around the harbor to make his sketches. The point is that Lane's treatment of sails makes them look characteristically filmy, therefore untrue to the reality. Wilmerding sees more of life and reality in Lane's fuller sails. As a surviving relic of the pre-dacron world of sail, I think he is wrong and that he would reinforce his speculations upon luminism by recognizing this and other differences between the participant and the spectator as artist.

Among the better known works of Mr. Laing are The Sea Witch (1933), The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner (1936), Sailing In: The Stereo-Book of Ships (1937), Clipper Ship Men (1944), Matthew Early (1957), American Sail: A Pictorial History (1961), Clipper Ships and Their Makers (1966), and American Ships (1971).