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Martin Johnson Heade
American, 1819 - 1904
It was after his move to New York City in the 1850s that he abandoned portraiture in favor of landscapes and coastals. Heade traveled widely and was in California in 1875. His oil Seal Rocks in the Oakland Museum is his only known California painting.
About 1885, he settled in St. Augustine, Florida, and remained there until his death on Sept. 4, 1904. Until 1943 his works were in eclipse, but today he is nationally known for his tropical landscapes, nature studies, and still lifes.
Martin Johnson Heade was born August 11, 1819, in rural Lumberville (Bucks County, PA). At the age of twenty-two he went to Italy and England and began a career as a portrait painter but his attention quickly turned to the landscape. He opened a studio in New York (1843) and four years later he opened a studio in Philadelphia and exhibited Sleepy Fishermen at the American Art Union (1847) and in St. Louis (1852). In 1853 he invested in Chicago real estate and then returned to Trenton (NJ, 1856-59).
From 1859-1866 he worked out of "The Old Tenth Street Studio" at 15 West Tenth Street in NYC and he occasionally worked in Boston's Studio Building finished paintings from sketches he had made of the coastline in and around Newport (RI), Lake Champlain and Fryeburg (ME). From 1843-1890 he exhibited at the NAD and elsewhere.
In 1863, Heade's interests in ornithology, entomology, botany and scenery culminated when he accompanied naturalist Reverend J.C. Fletcher to Brazil in hopes of illustrating a book titled "The Gems of Brazil" (of hummingbirds of South American) but the book never was published due to printing problems with chromolithographs.
Nevertheless, his birds and flowers were exhibited in Rio de Janeiro and the Emperor Don Pedro II presented Heade with the Order of the Rose. In 1865 Heade sold the group of paintings to Sir Morton Peto and traveled to Columbia, Peru, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Panama, Jamaica and throughout the U.S. to sketch and paint. He settled in St. Augustine (FL) in 1881 and died there September 4, 1904.
The artist received the Medaille d'Honneur, La Haye prior to 1870 (no record) and two medals in Boston (1874, 1878) after exhibiting at the Athenaeum.
Heade is best known for his paintings of orchids, hummingbirds, Florida sunsets, haystacks near winding rivers and marshfield meadows, tropical marshes, cherokee roses, water lilies, magnolias and cattle near hay saddles. Stebbins calls Heade "a romantic masquerading as a realist."
From September 29,1999 through January 17, 2000 the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston) held a "Martin Johnson Heade" exhibition and a book by Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr. accompanied it. The MFA previously held Heade solo exhibitions in 1969 and 1975.
Bibliography: McIntyre, Robert C., Martin Johnson Heade (NY: 1948); "Commemorative Exhibition, Paintings by Martin J. Heade & Fitz Hugh Lane," M. Knoedler & Co., NYC, 1954; "Martin Johnson Heade, 1819-1904," exhibition catalogue, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1955; "Martin Johnson Heade," exh. Cat., The Cummer Gallery of Art, Jacksonville (1981 touring); Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., The Life Work of Martin Johnson Heade (Yale Univ. Press, 1975)
Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904)
Renowned for his Luminist landscapes, particularly of storms at sea and northeastern salt marshes, as well as exquisite still life paintings, Martin Johnson Heade (originally Heed) was a versatile and exceptionally talented nineteenth-century American artist. He developed an original body of work in which atmospheric effects and exotic flowers and birds, closely observed, convey his vivid sense of the fleeting, fragile beauty of the natural world. Today, Heade's meticulously painted canvases continue to enchant us with their opulent surfaces, rich textures, and jewel-like details.
The variety of Heade's subjects was partly due to his peripatetic lifestyle. Born in 1819 in Lumberville, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, he trained in his early youth with the local Quaker painter Edward Hicks (1780-1849). After returning from an extended European trip between 1840 and 1842, he spent the next six years painting portraits and moving along the East Coast from New York to Trenton, Brooklyn, Richmond, and Philadelphia. In 1848 he set sail for a second long trip to Europe. His return to America in 1850 left him no more settled than before, and he continued to travel about and lived for brief periods in the cities of St. Louis, Trenton, Providence, and New Haven. It was in this decade that Heade turned to landscape painting. He began exploring the effects of light upon on the environment, an interest shared by other American Luminists including John C. Kensett, Fitz Hugh Lane and Sanford Gifford.
In 1859 Heade took a studio in the famous Tenth Street Studio building in New York where he met Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900), the Hudson River School painter noted for his panoramic vistas of Ecuador and Colombia. Church became one of Heade's few close associates in the American art world, and it was probably Church who encouraged Heade to make his first visit to the southern hemisphere. In 1863 Heade set off for Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He made several subsequent trips to Latin America and the tropics visiting Nicaragua, Colombia, Panama, and Jamaica. In these journeys Heade explored the local flora and fauna, painting both large landscapes and small paintings of hummingbirds and orchids, which won him acclaim at gallery exhibitions in New York and Boston. Heade's work from this period includes the series Gems of Brazil (1863 to 1864; created for an unrealized book), Hummingbird and Passion Flowers (1875 to 1885; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), and Orchids, Passion Flowers and Hummingbird (1875 to 1885; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York).
In 1883, at the age of sixty-four, Heade married in New York and moved to St. Augustine, Florida. He lived there for the rest of his life and continued to exhibit his work in northern cities like Boston and Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1885 at the invitation of his patron Henry Morrison Flager, the oil tycoon and hotel magnate, Heade set up his last studio in a building behind Flager's Ponce de Leon Hotel in St. Augustine, and painted there until the very end of his life. In his two decades in St. Augustine, Heade was fascinated by the tropical flora of Florida. He painted Cherokee roses, orchids, and magnolias, often depicting the same flower over and over in various states of bloom in different compositions.
Like his earlier studies of tropical flowers, paintings of Heade's mature period capture their botanical subjects with almost scientific accuracy, noting every line on every leaf, every particular mark and facet on every fruit or blossom. Unlike the earlier work, however, the later paintings rarely show subjects alive in their natural environments. After his move to St. Augustine, most of Heade's floral still lifes depict flowers and, occasionally, fruit against plush velvet backdrops. Clipped and propped before the artist's canvas, these lush, yet soon-to-wither specimens are a poignant contribution to the centuries-old genre of vanitas still lifes.
Heade's work can be found in the collections of many major American museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. With several dozen paintings as well as numerous drawings and sketchbooks, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston holds the largest collection of his work. In 1999 and 2000 Heade was the subject of a major traveling exhibition curated by Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr. Today, interest in this important American artist remains strong-in 2004, the U.S. Postal Service issued a Martin Johnson Heade stamp.
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