The composition is not unique in Lane's oeuvre. In a painting of New York Harbor (private collection), also from the 1850s, the two largest vessels and the small foreground sailboat which, in this case, heads into the picture space, are nearly identical. Using his own drawings as reference, Lane could economically repeat the design and pose of ships in various compositions although he was careful not to abuse this practice.

Despite the relative activity in the painting, View of Boston Harbor has a unity of tone which imparts a hushed note to the scene. Moreover, the commanding rhythms of the ocean swells are full, easy, and regular. The treatment and placement of the vessels is subtle. The great clipper ship at right center is marked by animated rigging: taut lines contrasted with free curving ones. The rigging, remarkably well-preserved, has a crispness and clarity all the more impressive for being painted freehand with a fine brush. Within the open center of the picture Lane frames the distant but distinctive dome of Bulfinch's statehouse, a feature of many of the Boston Harbor paintings.

In the development of a coherent space, Lane makes use of the alternation of bands of shadow and light on the water's surface, a favorite device of Robert Salmon, his most important predecessor in American marine painting. He goes beyond this, however, to develop a more varied perspective which includes the skillful variation of pose and placement of his many vessels.

Many details delight and instruct the observer: the wit of his signature, inscribed in a concave arc that echoes the trough of the wave; or the steamer glimpsed in the far right background. The fact that in 1852 such vessels were far more prominent in Boston Harbor than in his painting of it, suggests that Lane echoed the common lament that the progress represented by steam power, on land or on water, was at the expense of the ordained harmony between man and nature typified by majestic wind-powered ships.