Some people see Fitz Henry Lane’s tranquil view of a coastal town at sunset as a nostalgic look back at simpler times. Others see its swelling pink and peach tones as anticipating the abstract paintings of modernists like Mark Rothko. My attention always lingers on the lone figure in the bottom left, standing with his back turned, holding a pole. Even with the sense of stillness that pervades the canvas, I feel a tension between his immobility and the movement of the ships, which seem to drift away from his gaze, shrinking in the background. This tension is echoed in Lane’s own biography, as he lived with a disability that limited his mobility but spent his career painting ships that traveled very far, very fast.

As we try to reduce the spread of COVID-19 by restricting our movements, we can feel frozen, watching the rest of the world swirl around us, if not from a shore, then on a screen. But Lane’s work suggests that smaller environments—those we can encounter in a short car drive or neighborhood walk, or even within our own basements or closets—hold greater possibilities than we often notice.

When scholars reference Lane’s disability, they usually mention what he could not do—he could not study in Europe like other American artists; he could not explore the wilderness like other landscape painters. But he could walk with crutches or a cane, and he did travel across the coasts of Maine and Massachusetts, bringing a fresh vision to the familiar ports of Gloucester, Salem, and Boston. If we stop thinking in terms of what we cannot do, like Lane may have done, how might we see our surroundings differently?