Skip to main content

Martin Johnson Heade

Collections Menu
Photography by Dwight Primiano
Martin Johnson Heade
Photography by Dwight Primiano

Martin Johnson Heade

1819 - 1904
BiographyA significant figure in the history of American Luminism and American still life painting, Martin Johnson Heade was born in the Bucks County, Pennsylvania, town of Lumberville, the oldest of eight children born to Joseph Cowell Heed and his wife Sarah Johnson Heed. Deciding on painting as a career as a young child, Heade sought instruction from his Quaker neighbor, the folk painter Edward Hicks. Under Hicks's influence, Heade created his first works, portraits rendered in a flat, primitive style. In 1837, Heade went abroad, visiting Rome, England, and France. On his return two years later, he continued to create portraits and landscapes and was still working in a crude, simplified manner. But, after a second trip to Europe in 1848, Heade developed a more sophisticated handling and he widened his range of subjects to include genre painting and figures rendered in a neoclassical style. It was at this time that the artist changed his last name to "Heade," using this name to sign his works.

During the 1840s, Heade moved frequently, living in Philadelphia, New York, and Brooklyn. In the next decade, his efforts were concentrated in Chicago, Trenton, and Providence. He also visited St. Louis, on the western frontier. At the end of the decade he moved to New York, and rented accommodations in the Tenth Street Studio building. Close contact with leading artists of the day, who were also residents in the Tenth Street building, such as Frederic Church, inspired Heade to focus on landscape painting. Church's influence on Heade is evident in views of sunset-infused wilderness sites that Heade painted in the early 1860s. Heade's quiet, light filled, and minutely detailed views of Lake George, are characteristic of the American Luminist style and are similar to images by John Kensett of the same locale. During the 1860s, Heade began to specialize in the images of salt marshes for which he is well known and, in course of painting these subjects, his style matured. Heade found his marsh subjects in a number of locales, including Newbury, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Jersey. In 1867-1868, Heade made a series of exquisite charcoal drawings of haystacks on the Plum Island River, east of the town of Newbury.

While living in Boston from 1861-1863, Heade focused on marine scenes, depicting deserted coastlines with occasional sailboats in a landscape's distance and abandoned boats on the foreground shore. Heade's imagery as well as the feeling of stillness and melancholy expressed in these works suggests that Heade was familiar with similar depictions by Fitz Hugh Lane. However, the brooding and foreboding moods in images such as Heade's Thunderstorm over Narragansett Bay, 1868, (Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas), belongs solely to Heade. Heade was also especially adept at noting fleeting qualities in nature.

It was not until 1863 that Heade created his first still life and, at the end of that year, he traveled to Brazil, where he further explored the still life theme in a series of small pictures featuring various species of native hummingbirds. A trip to London to have these images reproduced in book form met with failure and Heade returned to South and Central America in 1866 and 1870. These trips yielded a number of tropical landscapes, but their most significant result was the series of orchid and hummingbird images that Heade worked on until his death.

From 1866 to 1881, Heade was based in New York City and produced the majority of his work in the studio. At this time, he acquired a number of patrons and received some critical acclaim. In 1883, Heade moved to St. Augustine, Florida and, at age sixty-four, he got married. Following his marriage, he produced several new floral still life series as well as a number of his most ambitious landscapes. At the end of his life, Heade was still a prolific painter although, after moving south, his work was forgotten by the public. It was only in the 1940s that the first study of the artist was produced, and this study began the rediscovery of Heade's art which has continued in recent decades.1

Heade is represented in major private and public collections across the country including the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts; Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine; Brooklyn Museum; Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island; Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio; Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Cleveland Museum of Art; Cummer Gallery of Art, Jacksonville, Florida; Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire; William E. Farnsworth Library and Art Museum, Rockland, Maine; Lyman Allyn Museum, New London, Connecticut; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; New Britain Museum, Connecticut; New York Historical Society; Oakland Art Museum, California; Philadelphia Museum of Art; St. Louis Art Museum; Shelburne Museum, Vermont; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts; Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.

LNP


Person TypeIndividual
Terms

    There are no works to discover for this record.