|
Martin
Johnson Heade's career was longer and more varied than
that of most American artists. He began as a portraitist
but switched in mid-career to landscape painting. Heade
was born in rural Pennsylvania in 1819 and first studied
portrait painting under Quaker painters Edward and
Thomas Hicks. While in his twenties, Heade refined his
skills as a professional portrait artist. His occasional
landscapes were roughly imitative of the then-popular
Hudson River School style.
Heade,
an incessant traveler throughout his life, spent two
years in Italy and visited France and England in the
1840s. Over the next 15 years, he lived in several
American cities, still working primarily as a portrait
painter. By age 40, he had not yet produced a work of
enduring artistic merit. Heade's turning point came in
the late 1850s, when he moved to New York City. He gave
up portrait painting and focused instead on landscapes
and shore scenes, topographically inspired by the salt
marshes around the Narragansett Bay region of Rhode
Island. His later landscapes-and the still lifes he
painted near the end of his career-are lush and rich in
color, reflecting his luminist style.
As
exemplified by his Approaching Storm: Beach Near Newport
(1860, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Heade's luminist
landscapes are eerie and compelling. Intent primarily on
conveying mood, Heade sacrificed realistic
representation, while elongating form, distorting
perspective and exaggerating color contrast. More than
100 of his seascapes and marsh paintings survive.
Heade
had an avowed lifelong obsession with hummingbirds. In
1863, he made the first of three trips to South America.
He first went to Brazil to prepare illustrations for a
book on hummingbirds. When the book project was
ultimately rejected by a London publisher, Heade began a
series of paintings in the 1870s which dramatically
combined orchids and hummingbirds in lush tropical
settings. The combination of the tiny birds and the
large overwhelming flowers in these paintings was
unprecedented. The pictures were startling-not just
because of the uniqueness of subject and intensity of
color, but also because of the underlying sensual
evocativeness of the flowers. Two Fighting Hummingbirds
with Two Orchids (1875, location unknown) is one of the
best examples of this period.
Heade finally settled in
St. Augustine, Florida, about 19 years before his death
there in 1904. He continued to paint seascapes and
birds. He also painted a number of still lifes,
frequently incorporating flowers, more for evocative
effect than for decorative addition.
|
