CNHI News Service New book reveals more secrets of Fitz H. Lane

Photos

Gloucester archivists Stephanie Buck, left, and Sarah Dunlap look through the tax valuation book from 1808-1820 where they found the only official documentation that Fitz Henry Lane was disabled. An entry in the book said Lane’s widowed mother did not have to pay taxes since she was caring for a “lame child.” The two have written a book, “Fitz Henry Lane: Family and Friends,” which sheds new light on the lives of Lane, his family, associates and close friends. Mike Dean/Gloucester Daily Times

Fitz Henry Lane, the famed Gloucester maritime painter, sat for this photograph at age 60, within a few years of his death in August 1865. Mandatory credit: Courtesy of the Cape Ann Historical Museum

In 1862, Fitz Henry Lane had a dream so memorable that he sketched the vision when he awoke. It later was commissioned as an oil painting, which became known as the “Dream Painting.” Courtesy photo/Gloucester Daily Times

GLOUCESTER, Mass. — Local historians Sarah Dunlap and Stephanie Buck shocked the art world in 2004 when they discovered that the painter known for decades as Fitz Hugh Lane was actually named Fitz Henry Lane.
Now, after three years of meticulous research, they have a lot more to tell about the world-renowned Gloucester artist whose Luminist paintings sell for millions of dollars at auction.
The fruits of their work are contained in a new book, “Fitz Henry Lane: Family and Friends.”
Among other things, the 185-page work provides new details about a bitter rift between Lane and his sister that led to a memorable dream that Lane turned into a painting.
“It’s not a book about an artist, but a book about a man who is also an artist,” Buck said.
Lane, the son of a sailmaker, was born Dec. 19, 1804, in a home at 85 Middle St. in the heart of the nation’s oldest fishing port. He was actually named Nathaniel Rogers Lane at birth but changed his name as a young man.
In Lane’s boyhood, the neighborhood included a shoe shop, a blacksmith shop, stables and a house carpentry shop. Across the street was a tavern frequented by soldiers and sailors. “Immediately next door to their house was a house of ill repute,” the book notes.
Lane died in 1865, just months after the Civil War ended. In 1930, Lane’s birthplace was torn down, and the site became the home of Cape Ann Cooperative Bank.
“It’s the story of his life in Gloucester before and after he lived in Boston,” said Buck, who works as a librarian and archivist at Cape Ann Historical Museum. Lane lived in Boston from about 1832 to 1848.
Dunlap, who said the book should be viewed as a springboard for more scholarship, said the work evolved from following leads about Lane’s life and times found in documents that were not available previously or may have been overlooked.
“The vision was to fill in gaps and correct errors and find out more about his friends,” said Dunlap, who works in the city archives department. “The information was just there to be found.”
They read all the research by the leading Lane authorities. They scoured the city archives, organized in the 1980s, and pored over records at the Cape Ann Historical Museum, home to the largest collection of Lane paintings.
“We said to ourselves that we discovered his name, what else can we discover?” Buck said. “We thought there has to be more information that wasn’t available when earlier books were written.”
The city’s municipal records provided some telling details.
Tax records confirmed that Lane was lame. After Lane’s father, Jonathan Dennison Lane, died when Lane was a boy of 14, his mother, Sarah Lane, received a tax abatement because she supported a lame child. Another document stated that the estate of Jonathan D. Lane “ought not to be taxed.”
“It was things like that we got from the city records,” Buck said. “You think this kind of information is boring until you put it together and it tells a story.”
The story of the family split is one example.
For about three decades, before and after his years in Boston, Lane lived with his sister Sarah and her husband, Ignatius Winter, a carpenter and window-sash maker. The household likely would have been noisy and busy because the couple had seven children.
After a few years back in Gloucester, Lane purchased land near Duncan Street. He designed and built a stone house on a hill near the inner harbor, today known as the Fitz Henry Lane House, off Harbor Loop. The granite house was completed around 1851.
He lived there with his sister’s family, the Winters, until he sold the house for $6,000 to one of his closest friends, Joseph L. Stevens, in 1862. Stevens bought the house with the help of another Lane friend, Dr. Herman E. Davidson.
The new owners evicted the Winters but allowed Lane to stay on.
Dunlap and Buck theorize that Lane’s friends may have been trying to provide the artist with a more tranquil home in his declining years while supplying him with enough cash from the sale to support himself.
Salem Superior Court records show that Lane’s brother-in-law, Ignatius Winter, sued Stevens and later the Lane estate over his eviction.
Court papers also refer to Stevens assaulting Winter, noting that Stevens “beat him and wounded him, forcibly and unlawfully threw him out.”
“We’re deducing that this is what caused the fight because it took place at the same time, in that summer and fall of 1862,” said Dunlap. “But he had about two and a half years of peace and quiet in the stone house before he died.”
The authors, however, wonder if Stevens really threw the first punch. A salesman of woolen cloth, Stevens was known as a mild-mannered individual and was active in the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
During “the time of unpleasantness” over the eviction, Lane took refuge at the luxurious Davidson home, which later became Sawyer Free Library.
It was there that Lane had the memorable dream.
“He dreamed the dream of being in this beautiful room in which there was a painting on the wall of a stranded and dismasted schooner on a beach,” said Dunlap. “When he woke up, he drew a sketch of it.”
Not long after, the sketch was commissioned as an oil painting, one which became known as the “Dream Painting.”
Lane’s friends were an important part of his life.
“Friends were the people he left things to, and Stevens was the biggest benefactor. He left nothing to the Winters family,” Dunlap said.
Stevens, who was at Lane’s bedside when he took his final breath, received two-thirds of the estate. The two friends are buried in the same plot in Oak Grove Cemetery.
After discovering the artist’s real name, someone once asked Dunlap if instances like that make her doubt all of history.
“Stories start up for no known reason, and society takes off with it and legends get built up,” she said. “But legends are useful, and the fashion is to try to find out what really happened.”

Gail McCarthy writes for the Gloucester Daily Times 0f Gloucester, Mass. E-mail her at gmccarthy@ecnnews.com