Martin Johnson Heade
Martin Johnson Heade (born August 11, 1819 in Lumberville , Pennsylvania , United States ; † September 4, 1904 in St. Augustine , Florida ) was a very prolific American painter , who portrayed salt marshes , seascapes , tropical birds as well as Lotus flowers and other still lifes was known. His style is derived from romanticism , which was popular during his lifetime.
Early life and education
Heade was the son of a warehouse worker in the small village of Lumberville on the Delaware River in Bucks County of the US state of Pennsylvania born. Until the 1850s, his family ran the Lumberville Store and Post Office, the only general store in town. Heade learned the basics of painting from Edward Hicks , who lived in nearby Newton . His cousin Thomas Hicks may also have played a role.
Creative phase
Early works
Heade began painting as early as 1839 - his earliest known work is a portrait from that year. He traveled a lot abroad and, among other things, lived in Rome for two years . In 1841 he exhibited his works for the first time as part of a presentation at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia , and in 1843 another exhibition at the National Academy of Design in New York . Heade regularly presented his work in exhibitions from 1848 and wandered around as a wandering artist until he settled in New York in 1859.
Landscape painting
About 1857 rose Heade's interest in landscape painting , which among other things, its contacts with the artists John Frederick Kensett and Benjamin Champney is returned, which he in the White Mountains in New Hampshire met. Heade rented a studio in the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York , where many artists from the Hudson River School such as Albert Bierstadt , Sanford Gifford and Frederic Edwin Church lived at the time. He established good professional and personal contacts with them and developed a particularly close friendship with Church . Landscape painting should make up a good third of his total works.
Tropical motifs
The monumental painting " The Heart of the Andes " created by his friend Church in 1859 , which is now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art , aroused Heades' passion for motifs from the tropics . From 1863 to 1864 he lived in Brazil , where he worked on a series of more than 40 pictures with hummingbirds as the main subject. This series was originally intended for a book entitled “The Gems of Brazil”, but Heade never published it due to financial difficulties and doubts about the achievable print quality. Nevertheless, he returned to the tropics on trips to Nicaragua in 1866 and to Colombia , Panama and Jamaica in 1870 to take more pictures of tropical birds and landscapes. He kept this passion until the end of his career.
Scenes with salt marshes
In the field of landscape painting, Heade was best known for his paintings of the salt marshes on the New England coast . In contrast to typical representations by the artists of the Hudson River School of mountains, valleys and waterfalls, Heade's images avoid glorifying the actual circumstances and instead focus on a controlled horizontal expansion of the scene shown, which among other things uses repetitive elements such as haystacks and people is achieved. Heade also concentrated on the representation of the lighting mood in his pictures. Because of these and similar works, some historians refer to him as a representative of luminism . Heade moved from New York to St. Augustine in Florida in 1883 and from that point onwards chose the subtropical surroundings of his new place of residence as the primary motif of his landscapes.
Late life and still life
He married in 1883 and moved to St. Augustine , Florida , where he lived and continued to paint until his death in 1904. His works, which were created in Florida, include, in continuation of his passion developed in the 1860s, above all still lifes with flowers, in particular magnolia blossoms placed on silk scarves . His earlier work typically shows small to medium-sized flowers arranged in an elaborate vase on a table covered with a piece of cloth. Heade is the only American artist of the 19th century who created such a large number of paintings in both still lifes and landscapes.
Relationship with the Hudson River School
Art historians are increasingly convinced that Heade - contrary to the established view - does not belong to the circle of the Hudson River School . This impression was largely due to the inclusion of his work in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1987, in which landscape paintings from the Hudson River School were shown. A few years after this exhibition, Theodore Stebbins , who was a student of Heade and who had written his catalog raisonné , wrote that other Heade students, as well as himself, had more and more doubts about considering Heade as part of the Hudson River School .
Only about 40 percent of Heade's works are landscapes, while the majority of his paintings include still lifes, birds, and portraits, all three of which are unrelated to the Hudson River School as subject areas . Stylistically, only a quarter of Heade's landscapes can be attributed to the Hudson River School . Heade was also far less interested in topographically correct representations than the painters at the Hudson River School and instead focused on moods and lighting effects. Stebbins wrote: “If the coastal paintings and the more conventional compositions [...] could lead the viewer to regard Heade as the Hudson River School painter , on the contrary, the [scenes of the salt marshes] make it clear that he is not was ".
reception
Heade was rather unknown during his lifetime and was almost completely forgotten until the first half of the 20th century. It was only at the time of World War II , as part of a newly awakened fundamental interest in 19th-century American art, that a new recognition of his work developed. The presentation of his painting Thunderstorm Over Narragansett Bay (1868) at the exhibition "Romantic Painting in America" at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943 contributed significantly to this . Art historians now consider him one of the most important American artists of his generation, and his work has also inspired contemporary artists such as David Bierk and Ian Hornak .
Heade's work is exhibited in most major US museums, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston , which has the largest collection, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC
In 1955, art historian and director of the Macbeth Gallery Robert McIntyre donated his collection of Heade's personal records to the Archives of American Art , part of the Smithsonian Institution . These papers included Heades sketchbook, notes and letters from his friend and artist colleague Frederic Edwin Church . In 2007 these documents were digitized and have been available on the Internet ever since.
From 1999 to 2000 Heade's work was the subject of a large exhibition organized by Theodore Stebbins, which began at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and ended with a stop at the Washington National Gallery of Art in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art .
In 2004, Heade was honored with a special stamp from the United States Postal Service showing his painting Giant Magnolias on a Blue Velvet Cloth from 1890.
Documented discoveries
Some of the most sensational discoveries include the following:
- The painting Thunderstorm on Narragansett Bay , now in the collection of the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth , Texas , was discovered in an antique shop in Larchmont, New York in 1943 by New York art dealer Victor Spark .
- The paintings Magnolia Blossoms on Blue Velvet and Cherokee Roses , now in private collections, were acquired for a total of US $ 60 when an apartment was closed in Arizona in 1996 . The first-time buyers auctioned both works of art at Christie's for $ 937,500 and $ 134,500, respectively , in the same year .
- The work Two Magnolias on Blue Plush was bought in 1989 by a private person from Wisconsin for 29 dollars at a flea market . Ten years later, he also auctioned it at Christie's for $ 882,500. Today it is in the collection of James W. McGlothlin in Bristol, Virginia .
- The painting Magnolias on Gold Velvet Cloth was used for years to cover a hole in the wall of an Indiana apartment building . The owner of the picture became curious about the value of the artwork after playing an art-related board game and had an art gallery in New York verify its authenticity. The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston purchased the artwork in 1999 for 1.25 million dollars.
- The initially unnamed representation of a salt marsh (now known as the River Scene ) was found in 2003 in the attic of a house in Boston . A local auction house auctioned the picture for almost one million dollars to an art dealer who presented it to the public on the PBS TV show "Find!" And sold it to a private collector. Today it is in the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts .
- In 2004, a Florida woman found out about the find on the show from her son and became aware of a 12 in (304.8 mm ) by 6 in (152.4 mm) picture that had been on her for decades Living room hung. The painting, which her husband bought for a few dollars in St. Augustine in the 1970s , was authenticated as a late work by Heade and sold to an art dealer at auction for $ 218,500.
- Another painting was found in an attic in Massachusetts in 2006, confirmed to be an original from 1883 to 1890, and auctioned for $ 198,000 in Fall River .
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ EL Fulton; R. Newman; J. Woodward; J. Wright: The Methods and Materials of Martin Johnson Heade . In: The Journal of the American Institute for Conservation . Vol. 41, No. 2 , 2002, ISSN 0197-1360 , OCLC 484817166 , p. 155-184 .
- ↑ a b c d e Nannette V. Maciejunes; Norma J. Roberts et al .: The American collections, Columbus Museum of Art . Ed .: Columbus Museum of Art. Museum, in association with HN Abrams, New York 1988, ISBN 978-0-8109-1811-5 .
- ↑ a b Martin Johnson Heade papers, 1853-1904. Archives of American Art, accessed January 30, 2013 .
- ↑ Martin Johnson Heade. American, 1819-1904. (No longer available online.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Archived from the original on May 9, 2009 ; accessed on January 30, 2013 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ Theodore E. Stebbins et al .: The life and work of Martin Johnson Heade . a critical analysis and catalog raisonné. Yale University Press, New Haven 2000, ISBN 978-0-300-08183-1 .
- ↑ 2004 comprehensive statement on postal operations. (PDF; 1.5 MB) United States Postal Service, 2004, p. 46 , accessed on January 31, 2013 (English).
- ^ Judith H. Dobrzynski: Painting Packs a Million Dollar Surprise. In: The New York Times . June 4, 1999, accessed January 31, 2013 .
literature
- Wilton, Andrew and Barringer, Tim: American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States 1820-1880 . The Princeton University Press, Princeton 2002, ISBN 0-691-09670-8 .
- Stebbins Jr., Theodore E .: The Life and Work of Martin Johnson Heade: A Critical Analysis and Catalog Raisonné . Yale University Press, New Haven 2000, ISBN 0-300-08183-9 .
- Stebbins Jr., Theodore E .: Martin Johnson Heade . Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, ISBN 0-87846-466-2 .
- Benfey, Christopher: A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, & Martin Johnson Heade . Penguin Books, New York, ISBN 978-1-59420-160-8 .
Web links
- 218 paintings by Martin Johnson Heade
- Biography of Martin Johnson Heade of the Hollis Taggart Galleries
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Heade, Martin Johnson |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American painter |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 11, 1819 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Lumberville , Pennsylvania |
| DATE OF DEATH | 4th September 1904 |
| Place of death | St. Augustine , Florida |