Newburyport Marshes: Approaching Storm

A stream threads a serpentine course through a flat marshland in Martin Johnson Heade’s Newburyport Marshes: Approaching Storm. The vista, terminating in a range of dunes, is dotted with globular haystacks that dwarf a diminutive fisherman and farmers loading hay onto a horse-drawn wagon in the distance. In the foreground a solitary fisherman, his wicker creel on the ground nearby, further suggests the natural bounty of marshland life while lending a sense of scale to the scene. Benign sunlight illuminates the farther landscape, but storm clouds fringing the top of the image cast the nearer ground in ominous shadow. Deep spatial recession is tempered by the balanced disposition of masses alternately on left and right, while the upright forms of haystacks, boulders, trees, wagon, and figures relieve the pronounced horizontality of the scene. Heade’s simplified composition, with its mood of hushed expectation, contrasts markedly with the overwhelming profusion of material objects in his painting Still-Life with Apple Blossoms in a Nautilus Shell (TF 1999.7).

Between 1859 and his death, Heade made some 120 paintings of coastal marshlands in the eastern United States, amounting to about one-fifth of his total output. The most dramatic compositions were the product of the years between 1865 and 1870, soon after Heade traveled to Central and South America. In contrast with his friend Frederic Edwin Church, Heade took a microcosmic view of the natural history of the tropics in his intimate landscape paintings and close-up views of the region’s exotic flora and fauna, notably orchids and hummingbirds. His approach to the humble landscape of the tidal marshes around Newburyport, Massachusetts, was similarly intimate, combining close observation of natural details and subtle suggestion of hushed quiet and transitory stasis.

Indeed, the landscape Heade pictured represented a fragile balance between man and nature, civilization and wilderness. Saltmarsh haying was an activity undertaken urgently, when tides were low and at the mercy of the weather, as suggested here in the threatening band of clouds whose shadows sweep the land. Moreover, in Heade’s day young farmers were abandoning such traditional work to settle open lands in the West. While the farmers shown in his painting represent a vanishing rural way of life, the artist, an avid conservationist, was also deeply aware of the environmental harm caused by the cattle for which salt hay was harvested.

Marshlands were a virtually untried pictorial subject when Heade began painting them. Flat, open, and offering few features to relieve their seeming monotony, they deviated unforgivably from the conventions of picturesque landscape art. By the mid-1860s, however, Heade was among many American landscape artists who had come to appreciate the level, quiet places where land and water meet and mingle under open skies. They used such settings as vehicles not only for exploring subtle light and atmospheric effects but also for meditations on time’s passage, the fleeting beauty of nature, and the redemptive value of rural life. Like Brace's Rock, Brace's Cove (TF 1999.83) by Fitz Henry Lane, for example, Heade’s Newburyport Marshes: Approaching Storm envisions the littoral landscape as a place of spiritual imminence.

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