Martin Johnson Heade

Martin Johnson Heade was one of the central figures in an American landscape painting movement that twentieth-century critics have characterized as “luminism,” a late manifestation of the Hudson River school of landscape painting whose practitioners sought to express nuances of light and atmosphere, projecting an aura of serenity and timelessness. A native Pennsylvanian, Heade received rudimentary training in art from Quaker painter Edward Hicks. After 1843 Heade’s peripatetic life took him to cities along the East Coast and as far away as St. Louis, Missouri. He supported himself in each city by painting portraits. In 1859 he settled in the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York City, where he began an enduring friendship with the noted landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church, whose canvases of exotic South American scenes based on his travels received tremendous critical acclaim.

A prodigious artist, Heade painted between fifteen and twenty-five works annually during his long career and participated actively in exhibitions across the country. By 1860, he had dedicated himself to depicting landscapes and flowers, artworks that made his reputation. Heade’s own trips to South and Central America in the mid-1860s ignited his interest in exotic blooms and hummingbirds. He was still fascinated by flowers twenty years later when he moved to St. Augustine, Florida. Critics hailed Heade’s sensuous, evocative flower studies for their sensitivity to nature.