What Makes Fitz Henry Lane's Lithographs So Special? at Boston Athenaeum

What Makes Fitz Henry Lane's Lithographs So Special?

Georgia Barnhill

In this richly illustrated talk, Georgia Barnhill sheds fresh light on the beloved American luminist painter and printmaker Fitz Henry Lane, the subject of her current exhibition, Drawn from Nature & On Stone: The Lithographs of Fitz Henry Lane at the Cape Ann Museum. Barnhill, curator emerita of graphic arts at the American Antiquarian Society, considers Lane’s work within the context of his contemporaries, Benjamin Chimney, Robert Cooke, Benjamin F. Nutting, Robert Salmon, David Claypoole Johnston—among others and explores his deep association with the Boston Athenæum, where the artist first exhibited in 1841.

Georgia Barnhill was curator of graphic arts at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester for forty years and established its Center for Historic American Visual Culture several years before retiring in 2012.  She worked with Sally Pierce and Catharina Slautterback on the Athenaeum's 1997 exhibition, Early American Lithography: Images to 1830. Among her publications are Wild Impressions: The Adirondacks on Paper, Bibliography on American Prints of the Seventeenth through the Nineteenth Centuries, and an essay in Drawn from Nature & On Stone: The Lithographs of Fitz Henry Lane published by the Cape Ann Museum in the fall of 2017. She has edited several conference volumes including New Views of New England: Studies in Material and Visual Culture, 1680-1830 with Martha McNamara for the Colonial Society of Massachusetts.