Martin Johnson Heade

1819 - 1904 • American • Painter • Hudson River School/Luminist

"The artist [Heade] evidently looks on nature with a poet's eye, and transfers his emotion to the canvas." - Boston Transcript, Feb. 27, 1861

Little personal information about Heade survives other than that he was born in Lumberville, Pennsylvania, the son of a well-to-do farmer, that he studied with folk artist HICKS, that he first exhibited in Philadelphia in 1841, and that he traveled avidly until he arrived in 1883, at the age of 64, and settled in Saint Augustine, Florida, where he died at 85. Heade was entirely forgotten until 1942, when his painting Thunderstorm, Narragansett Bay (1868) was found in a Larchmont, New York, antique store. Unique, not only in Heade's oeuvre but also among marine paintings of any era, the mood of the picture is dark, eerie, and ominous. In the LUMINIST style, Heade's technique is hardedged and his brushstroke is invisible. Unappreciated during the artist's lifetime, as was Heade himself, Thunderstorm is now being examined with new ideas about the artist's intention vis-a-vis the history of slavery, the Civil War, and industrialization. Although he painted portraits earlier in his career, after 1860 people appear only as small, symbolic presences in the landscape. Besides his maritime scenes, during his long career Heade painted a few themes in perhaps obsessive series: hummingbirds, magnolias, and more than 100 pictures of salt marshes. The latter call Ecclesiastes to mind: "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity .... All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place whence the rivers come, thither they return again."