Art world adjusts to Lane change

A magical sky fills a harbor town. Schooners glide through still water. Spires and gabled roofs dot the waterfront. Well-dressed locals have a picnic in a pasture on a hot summer day.

The oil painting ``Castine, Maine" bears the flawless hand of the artist long known as Fitz Hugh Lane, the 19th-century marine master from Gloucester. Lane's paintings, many of them of the New England coast, fetch millions at auction and hang in the world's top museums, as well as in the White House.

But the label next to the painting displayed in ``Painting Summer in New England," the showcase exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, says the artist is Fitz Henry Lane.

Yes, Henry.

The label is right. And it is only the latest example of how museums of all sizes -- from tiny Cape Ann Historical Museum in Gloucester to the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. -- have addressed the changing identity of one of America's foremost maritime artists.

Fitz Hugh Lane is really Fitz Henry Lane. The goof was discovered about 18 months ago by city archivists in Gloucester, where his bronze statue overlooks Gloucester Harbor, the inspiration for some of his most famous marine scenes.

Discovery of the mistake -- which had been perpetuated by scholars, art dealers, and private collectors -- has prompted museums across the country to correct labels, catalogs, and archival records. Even the White House was notified.

``Everything has happened very, very quickly," said Daniel Finamore, curator of maritime art and history at the Peabody Essex. ``The news traveled much more rapidly than other types of discoveries" in the art world, he said.

But apparently not to the West Coast.

``Oh, my! His name changed?" asked Ilene Susan Fort, curator of American art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, who visited Gloucester on her honeymoon in the 1970s to view the Lane collection at the Cape Ann Historical Museum.

So how did the artist formerly known as Fitz Hugh become Fitz Henry?

It started in September 2004, when John Wilmerding, a top Lane scholar, gave a lecture celebrating Lane's 200th birthday at Cape Ann Historical Museum. He challenged people to think more critically about Lane, whose popularity has soared over the last decade, as his paintings have sold at auction for as much as $5.5 million.

Wilmerding also asked people to solve the original mystery about Lane's name: Why did the artist, who was christened Nathaniel Rogers Lane, decide to legally change his name at age 27 and become, or so historians had believed, Fitz Hugh Lane?

The Gloucester Archives Committee, a volunteer group, started to dig.

They began with an Internet search of name change petitions filed in Massachusetts in 1831, the year the aspiring lithographer and painter decided to take on a new identity. But the only mention they found was a listing for ``Fitz Henry Lane." They figured it was a misprint. To double check, Sarah Dunlap, the committee's cochairwoman, went to the Lynnfield Public Library, which has an extensive genealogy collection. A copy of the state archives book listed the change as Fitz Henry Lane.

``I still thought it was wrong," Dunlap said.

The next day, she and three other volunteers went to the state archives in Boston to look at the original name-change petitions for 1831, a stack several inches thick. ``We kept going through and through," Buck recalled. ``His [petition] was the second to last one."

And that's when the real story stared them in the face. In Lane's own handwriting was a request to change his name to Fitz Henry Lane.

``It's Henry!" Dunlap recalls shouting in the archives room.

How to break the news to the art world? And to Gloucester, where ``Fitz Hugh Lane" is chiseled in stone on a gravemarker, and in bronze on the statue overlooking the harbor?

The four decided to write an article about their discovery, which was published in February 2005 by The Essex Genealogist, a Lynnfield-based quarterly journal.

``We wanted to correct a mistake that stuck for a very long time," Dunlap said.

The archivists also told the Cape Ann Historical Museum, which in turn notified Wilmerding, whose 1971 book on Lane was in the process of being reprinted. Wilmerding changed the name of the book to ``Fitz Henry Lane," but kept all text references to ``Fitz Hugh Lane."

Still unclear is why and when people started calling Lane ``Hugh."

``At the time, Fitz Hugh was a common double name," said Wilmerding. ``Accidentally, it was assumed the `H' stood for Hugh."

Lane himself wasn't much help. He usually signed paintings ``Fitz H. Lane" or ``F.H. Lane," or sometimes simply ``F.H.L." But on at least two occasions he did sign ``Fitz Henry Lane." The two scenes of New York Harbor are part of collections at the Museum of the City of New York and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Andrea Henderson Fahnestock, curator of paintings and sculpture at the city museum, said by e-mail that the seemingly errant signatures had always been ``simply a mystery . . . one happily solved by the discovery of his name change."

The first published reference to him as Fitz Hugh Lane popped up in the early 20th century in newspaper articles, after Lane's work, which had fallen out of favor during the rise of French Impressionism, came back into vogue.

Volunteers at the Gloucester archives continue to comb tax records, property deeds, and other official documents that could hold more clues to Lane's life. A new book on the artist, addressing the name change and other foggy facts about his life, including his schooling and training as a painter, is due out later this month.

Museums have handled the name change differently. Most affected were museums with large numbers of Lanes, including the Museum of Fine Arts and the Peabody Essex Museum .

The MFA changed its labels last June, shortly after word of the discovery buzzed through museum circles. The Cape Ann Historical Museum is planning a major relabeling for its Fitz Hugh Lane Gallery and a new exhibit on the correctly named artist next January.

The Peabody Essex opted for a less dramatic approach. In its maritime galleries, new labels have been put up that read " Fitz Henry [Hugh] Lane."

But when it came to ``Painting Summer," the museum opted to face facts.

``We've come to grips," Finamore, the maritime curator, said, laughing. ``But it will be years before Fitz Henry comes out of my mouth naturally."

Kathy McCabe can be reached at kmccabe@globe.com.