Numerous American artists before Fitz Henry Lane depicted the sea occasionally, but they were mainly painters of portrait, history, allegory, and landscape. Lane, on the other hand, made marine painting his essential stock-in-trade. Of about 190 oils he painted, fewer than a tenth are other than sea and coastal subjects. He rightly deserves art historian John Wilmerding's high regard as "our first native marine painter of real stature." Lane sailed often. He was keenly aware of the ocean's manifold appearances and he developed a thorough knowledge of ship architecture. His painting is distinguished for accuracy and detail. He was also fascinated by the cool, hazy, radiant atmosphere of the New England offshore region; for his adeptness in portraying it, he is considered one of the foremost American luminists. Richard McLanathan observes:

. . . his work reflects a new sensitivity to the special quality of American light. Though a hushed quiet pervades almost all his paintings, and his compositions in general have a marked sense of repose, there is nevertheless an intensity in the concentration with which he records what he sees that equally expresses his poetic feelings about the scene.

Lane's origins, not surprisingly, were near the sea. The second of four children, he was born in 1804 at Gloucester, Massachusetts. His father, Jonathan Dennison Lane, was a sailmaker. Earlier ancestors had been among Gloucester's first settlers in 1623. A childhood disease, probably polio, left his legs partially crippled. While debilitated he began making sketches, and as his condition improved, he took to drawing the dramatic coast around Cape Ann. It was not until he was twenty-eight years old, however, that he had any kind of professional instruction. On the strength of his natural drawing ability, he was admitted in 1832 as an apprentice draftsman for the William S. Pendleton lithography firm in Boston. Becoming a master lithographer, he remained with Pendleton until 1837, when he joined the new company of Keith and Moore. In 1845 he formed his own lithographic shop in partnership with marine painter John W. A. Scott. The association continued through summer of 1848, when Lane moved back to Gloucester.

Lane produced his first oils about 1840, and his training as a printmaker is especially evident in the meticulous, comparatively hard manner of his earliest paintings. But the greater influence upon his style was the English-born land and seascape painter, Robert Salmon (1775-1844), who came to the United States in 1828 and resided in Boston until returning to Europe in 1842. Unquestionably the best marine artist in America during the years of Lane's early progress, Salmon brought forth the atmospheric effects of J. M. W. Turner, Horace Vernet, and other European romantics. Salmon's Boston Harbor from Constitution Wharf of c. 1829 (Naval Academy Museum, Annapolis) seems a definite inspiration for Lane's piece in the Hunter collection, The Constitution in Boston Harbor, painted in the late 1840s. The format of the two works is remarkably similar, particularly the positioning of the great American frigate in the water. Lane's horizon line is characteristically at the lower fourth of the composition (Salmon's typically would be at the lower third), so that the sky is vast. The swelling cloud bank behind the Constitution seems halo-like, setting the ship apart both visually and psychologically as the hallowed national monument it had become. The ship gained fame during the War of 1812, winning sea engagements against the British. Watching enemy shells bounce off its sturdy oak hull, American sailors dubbed the ship "Old Ironsides." It had long since been retired from combat readiness when Lane did the painting, though at mid-century it was still a commissioned Navy vessel, used primarily for training. The Boston harbor is identified by the several structures faintly visible in the distance. In the matters of historic documentation and civic pride, harbor scenes would come to constitute an important division within the broader category of marine painting. They were as much in demand as the familiar scenes of gentlemen's estates or the bird's eye city views. Robert B. Stein explains:

The harbor view tradition reinforced the romantic sense of voyaging out into seascape space at the same time that it harnessed that impulse for national purpose, defined it as specifically American by situating it within a particular American harbor.

Probably three-fourths of Lane's marines depict seaports -- at Boston, Gloucester, New York City, the Maine coast, in Puerto Rico, and other places. As Wilmerding again points out, he was truly one of the best of the harbor painters.

Lane was popular in his lifetime. But after his death in 1865, his reputation, his work, even his person (that is, his mortal remains) fell into oblivion. Never married, without family, alone at his passing, his grave at the Oak Grove Cemetery in Gloucester remained unmarked for almost a century. In 1960 members of the Cape Ann Historical Association arranged for a stone to be cut and put in place. That belated gesture followed upon the rediscovery of Lane's extraordinary achievement by such art historians as John I. H. Baur, who wrote the first definitive essay on American luminism in 1949.