Questroyal 2009

Martin Johnson Heade ( 1819 – 1904 ) Plate 20 Newburyport, Massachusetts , c. 1880 – 1890 Oil on canvas 10 3 / 8 x 20 5 / 16 inches provenance Terry de Lapp Galleries, Los Angeles Private collection, Louisiana Richard York Gallery, NewYork Dr. Herbert and Elizabeth Sussman exhibited Richard York Gallery, NewYork, Inaugural Exhibition: Paintings by Americans, April 10 –May 29, 1981 Richard York Gallery, NewYork, Sunset to Dawn:Views of Evening by Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century Americans, 1983 literature Inaugural Exhibition : Paintings by Americans, exh. cat. (NewYork: Richard York Gallery, 1981 ). Sunset to Dawn:Views of Evening by Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century Americans, exh. checklist (NewYork: Richard York Gallery, 1983 ). Theodore E. Stebbins Jr., The Life andWork of Martin Johnson Heade: A Critical Analysis and Catalogue Raisonné (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2000 ), p. 268 , no. 272 . Martin Heade Painted like ThoreauWrote. Headline in TheWashington Post , 1965 1 None of our painters has a more refined sense of beauty, or a more delicate feeling for color. henry t. tuckerman, art critic and author of Book of the Artists , 1870 2 One of a Kind In his 2000 catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work, Theodore Stebbins Jr. stated, “Heade was the only major artist in nineteenth-century America who devoted as much attention to still life as to landscape and who made equally significant contributions in each.” 3 Although Heade was undoubtedly well known for both genres, his contemporaries gravitated towards his singular marsh scenes such as Newburyport, Massachusetts . Early critics proposed that the artist’s talent was especially manifest in his paintings of “marsh- lands, with hay-ricks, and the peculiar atmospheric effects thereof;” others went so far as to claim, “he has done no better work than in his studied and realistic representation of our Northern and Eastern lowlands and meadows.” 4 Modern critics have taken equal notice of Heade’s lushmarshes. In 2001 , The New York Times art critic Ken Johnson wrote that “Heade’s best-known works depict wide, flat acres of marshland raked by the setting sun.” Johnson further described the appeal of these landscapes through a striking comparison, explaining, “Martin Johnson Heade has been called the Vermeer of nineteenth-century American painting. To be sure, his luminous, awesomely spacious landscapes may seem a far cry from the Delft master’s intimate interiors, but like the latter’s, Heade’s paintings have a magical lucidity and an enigmatic psychology that continue to captivate the eyes and haunt the minds of modern viewers.” 5 Unequalled in his evocation of the “rich sun-glow and sense of summer warmth,” of America’s marshlands, Heade was, like Vermeer, one of a kind. 6 –– jlw Heade’s works are featured in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Cleveland Museum of Art, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 1 Elisabeth Stevens, “Martin Heade Painted like ThoreauWrote,” TheWashington Post, Times Herald , May 16, 1965. 2 Henry T. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists (NewYork: James F. Carr, reprinted 1966 ), p. 542 . 3 My emphasis; Theodore E. Stebbins Jr., The Life andWork of Martin Johnson Heade: A Critical Analysis and Catalogue Raisonné (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2000 ), p. 108 . 4 Tuckerman, 543 ; “Fine Arts,” The Independent Devoted to the Consideration of Politics, Social and Economic Tendencies, History, Literature, and the Arts 33 , no. 1696 (June 2, 1881 ): 7 . 5 Ken Johnson, “Human Touch Is Common in Heade’s Landscapes,” The NewYork Times, July 19, 2001. 6 James Jackson Jarves, The Art-Idea: Sculpture, Painting, and Architecture in America, 2 d ed. (NewYork: Hurd and Houghton; London: Sampson Low, Son and Marston: 1865 ), p. 236 .