Fitz Henry Lane
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 Lane's Owl's Head, Penobscot Bay, Maine, Smarthistory
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Fitz Henry Lane (born Nathaniel Rogers Lane, also known as Fitz Hugh Lane) (December 19, 1804 – August 14, 1865) was an American painter and printmaker of a style that would later be called Luminism, for its use of pervasive light.
Fitz Henry Lane was born on December 19, 1804, in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Lane was christened Nathaniel Rogers Lane on March 17, 1805, and would remain known as such until he was 27. It was not until March 13, 1832 that the state of Massachusetts would officially grant Lane's own formal request (made in a letter dated December 26, 1831) to change his name from Nathaniel Rogers to Fitz Henry Lane.
As with practically all aspects of Lane's life, the subject of his name is one surrounded by much confusion—it was not until 2005 that historians discovered that they had been wrongly referring to the artist as Fitz Hugh, as opposed to his chosen Fitz Henry. The reasons behind Lane's decision to change his name, and for choosing the name he did, are still very unclear; although, one suggestion is that he did it "to differentiate himself from the well-known miniature painter Nathaniel Rodgers".
From the time of his birth, Lane would be exposed to the sea and maritime life—a factor that obviously had a great impact his later choice of subject matter. Many circumstances of his young life ensured Lane's constant interaction with various aspects of this maritime life, including the fact that Lane's family lived "upon the periphery of Gloucester Harbor's working waterfront," and that his father, Jonathan Dennison Lane, was a sailmaker, and quite possibly owned and ran a sail loft. It is often speculated that Lane would most likely have pursued some seafaring career, or become a sail-maker like his father, instead of an artist, had it not been for a lifelong handicap Lane developed as a child. Although the cause cannot be known with certainty, it is thought that the ingestion of some part of the Peru-Apple—a poisonous weed also known as jimsonweed—by Lane at the age of eighteen months caused the paralysis of the legs from which Lane would never recover. Furthermore, it has been suggested by art historian James A. Craig that because he could not play games as the other children did, he was forced to find some other means of amusement, and that in such a pursuit he discovered and was able to develop his talent for drawing. To go a step further, as a result of his having a busy seaport as immediate surroundings, he was able to develop a special skill in depicting the goings-on inherent in such an environment.
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