Born in Gloucester, Massachusetts with the name of Nathaniel Rogers Lane, Fitz Henry (Hugh) Lane became one of America's preeminent marine painters. During his lifetime, he was described as the "country's second-greatest marine painter, but he faded in renown from about 1870 until the re-emergence of interest in American painting in the 1930s." (Dunlap)

Fitz Henry (Hugh) Lane was crippled since childhood and walked with crutches, a condition long attributed to childhood disease. Latest research though has shown that disease was a remote and unlikely culprit for Lane's loss of mobility, the most plausible of possibilities being the ingestion of the neurotoxin Datura stramonium.(see Craig, pages 17 & 18).

As an...