Martin Johnson Heade

Martin Johnson Heade was one of the most significant American painters of the nineteenth century, creator of portraits, history and genre pictures, still lifes, ornithological studies, landscapes, and marines, and his own unique orchid and hummingbird compositions. This book brings a perspective to Heade and his works, presenting him as one of the most original and productive painters of his time. Theodore Stebbins builds on his acclaimed 1975 study of Heade, drawing on several newly discovered collections of Heade's letters and the painter's own Brazilian journal. Stebbins tells of Heade's training and early career as an itinerant portraitist and discusses his move to New York, where, under the influence of Frederic E. Church, he began painting landscapes and seascapes. He examines Heade's relationships with patrons and dealers, writers and scientists, and he sheds new light on Heade’s trips to Brazil, to the Central American tropics, and to London. And he describes Heade's move to Florida in 1883, which marked not his retirement but a final period of creativity that lasted until his death in 1904. The book includes not only an examination of Heade's life and works but also reproductions of all his 620 known paintings, including nearly 250 that have been discovered since 1975.

Annotation. "Roberta Favis tells the story of the last two decades of the life and artistic career of Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904), when the peripatetic painter settled permanently in St. Augustine, Florida. Providing generous illustrations in both black and white" Annotation. Roberta Favis tells the story of the last two decades of the life and artistic career of Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904), when the peripatetic painter settled permanently in St. Augustine, Florida. Providing generous illustrations in both black and white and color, she reassesses his career and importance by focusing on this late period of his work and looking more closely at his local context and the contemporary issues particular to the state that became his home. The history of Heade's career in Florida is, like many Florida stories, a complicated interplay between the forces of tourism and development and the rich natural beauty of the state. Favis closely examines Heade's relation to the development of tourism in St. Augustine and uses his writings to show his sometimes conflicting attitudes toward development and conservation. He artistically celebrated the beauties of the state being touted as "the new Eden," but he was an active participant in the projects of Henry Flagler to transform St. Augustine into a mecca for northern tourists, while his writings expressed concern that the pristine environment and its inhabitants were already threatened. In words and in pictures, Heade spoke of the vitality, beauty, and the fragility of Florida. Combining his biography, art, and writing, Favis captures and early chapter in the history of art in Florida and brings to light an early and compelling advocate for the preservation of the state's natural riches. ... Adapted from jacket.

Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904) was under-appreciated during his lifetime, forgotten in death, and rediscovered four decades later, yet today he is recognized as one of the most important artists America has produced. This book surveys Heade's long and diverse career and includes examples of his portraits, landscapes, hummingbirds, still lifes, and flowers. Heade's history is vague; he was an artist who wrote often and copiously, but seldom about his own work or himself. Although his work will continue to be researched and his philosophical and aesthetic concerns speculated on, he will, nevertheless, remain enigmatic.

Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904) had the longest career and produced perhaps the most varied body of work of any American painter of the nineteenth century. His prolific oeuvre ranges from American coastal marshes and marine landscapes to the lush tropical splendor of South and Central American landscapes, birds, and flowers. An independent thinker as well as a world traveler, Heade developed a singular approach to landscape and still life painting, adapting some elements of the style and practice of the Hudson River School to his own more Darwinian vision. While Heade had only a minor reputation in his own day and was completely forgotten for many decades after his death, he is now rightly regarded as an artist of great significance and originality, and as the only American whose landscapes and still lifes are equally important. In this elegantly illustrated book, the catalogue for the second major retrospective of Heade's work in thirty years, Theodore Stebbins and his collaborators focus on the major themes of Heade's work: seascapes, salt marshes, landscapes, tropical landscapes, the "gems" of Brazil (as hummingbirds are known), passion flowers, orchids, and his late work in Florida. There are also chapters on Heade's critics and the development of Heade's painting technique.

The country's most noted writers, poets, and artists converge at a singular moment in American life, a great companion to fans of the film A Quiet Passion, starring Cynthia Nixon as Emily Dickinson. At the close of the Civil War, the lives of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade intersected in an intricate map of friendship, family, and romance that marked a milestone in the development of American art and literature. Using the image of a flitting hummingbird as a metaphor for the gossamer strands that connect these larger-than-life personalities, Christopher Benfey re-creates the summer of 1882, the summer when Mabel Louise Todd-the protégé to the painter Heade-confesses her love for Emily Dickinson's brother, Austin, and the players suddenly find themselves caught in the crossfire between the Calvinist world of decorum, restraint, and judgment and a new, unconventional world in which nature prevails and freedom is all.

A breathtaking selection of works from the largest and finest collection of Hudson River paintings in the world Hudson River School paintings are among America's most admired and well-loved artworks. Such artists as Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, and Albert Bierstadt left a powerful legacy to American art, embodying in their epic works the reverence for nature and the national idealism that prevailed during the middle of the nineteenth century. This book features fifty-seven major Hudson River School paintings from the collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, recognized as the most extensive and finest in the world. Gorgeously and amply illustrated, the book includes paintings by all the major figures of the Hudson River School. Each work is beautifully reproduced in full color and is accompanied by a concise description of its significance and historical background. The book also includes artists' biographies and a brief introduction to American nineteenth-century landscape painting and the Wadsworth Atheneum's unique role in collecting Hudson River pictures.

Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904) had the longest career and produced perhaps the most varied body of work of any American painter of the nineteenth century. His prolific oeuvre ranges from American coastal marshes and marine landscapes to the lush tropical splendor of South and Central American landscapes, birds, and flowers. An independent thinker as well as a world traveler, Heade developed a singular approach to landscape and still life painting, adapting some elements of the style and practice of the Hudson River School to his own more Darwinian vision. While Heade had only a minor reputation in his own day and was completely forgotten for many decades after his death, he is now rightly regarded as an artist of great significance and originality, and as the only American whose landscapes and still lifes are equally important.