In Painting the Inhabited Landscape (Penn State, 2023), Margaretta Lovell (History of Art) singles out the modestly scaled, explicitly inhabited landscapes of Fitz H. Lane and investigates the patrons who 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.

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.

She is joined by David Henkin (History).