American Antiquarian Society
185 Salisbury Street
Worcester, MA 01609
United States
Join us as historian Margaretta Lovell discusses her new publication, Painting the Inhabited Landscape: Fitz Henry Lane and the Global Reach of Antebellum America. During the program, Lovell will explore the paintings of Gloucester native Fitz H. Lane and the community and the patrons that supported his career with an eye to understanding how New Englanders thought about their land, their economy, their history, and their links with widely disparate global communities.
The impulse in much nineteenth-century American painting and culture was to describe nature as a wilderness on which the young nation might freely inscribe its future. Lane’s works depict nature as productive and allied in partnership with humans to create a sustainable, balanced political economy. What emerges from this close look at Lane’s New England is a picture not of a “virgin wilderness” but of a land deeply resonant with its former uses—and a human history that incorporates, rather than excludes, Native Americans as shapers of land and as agents in that history.
Margaretta M. Lovell is a cultural historian working at the intersection of history, material culture studies, architectural history, and art history. She is the author of prize-winning books on American art and culture of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. She teaches at the University of California, Berkeley where she holds the Jay D. McEvoy, Jr., Chair in the History of American Art. Her interests include ecological and economic history, and her research has been supported by the Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Terra Foundations, the NEH, Huntington Library, American Philosophical Society, and the American Council of Learned Societies. In 2007-08 she was the Mellon Distinguished Scholar in Residence at AAS where she enjoyed a deep dive into initial research for Painting the Inhabited Landscape: Fitz Henry Lane and the Global Reach of Antebellum America (Penn State Press, 2023). She was elected to AAS membership in October, 2001 and served as a councilor from 2016-2022.