HEADE, Martin Johnson (Lumberville, 1819 – St. Augustine, 1904)
Martin Johnson Heade, the eldest son of a prosperous farmer, Joseph Cowell Heed, was born on 11 August 1819, at Lumberville, Pennsylvania, a small town north of Philadelphia. By 1846 he had changed the spelling of his family name from “Heed” to “Heade”. At an early age Heade received training from Edward Hicks, a Quaker folk painter best known for his many paintings of “The Peaceable Kingdom”, and undoubtedly also knew the painter’s younger cousin, the portrait painter Thomas Hicks. In the late 1830s or early 1840s, Heade travelled to Europe, spending two years in Rome and also visiting France and England. Heade’s earliest paintings were portraits, at first in a primitive manner, but by the 1850s they had progressed to a competent, academic style. In 1848, Heade was again in Rome, at the same time as Thomas Hicks, and was painting such genre scenes as Roman Newsboys (c. 1848–1849, Ohio, The Toledo Museum of Art).
The painter travelled widely from 1851 to 1858, living in St. Louis, Chicago, Trenton, New Jersey, and Providence, Rhode Island. His earliest dated landscape of importance, Rocks in New England (Boston, Museum of Fine Arts) was painted in 1855. By 1859 Heade had moved to the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York where he met Frederic Edwin Church. Rhode Island Shore (1859, location unknown) was Heade’s first landscape to include a haystack; the following year he painted his first marsh scene, Single Haystack in a Flat Marsh (1860, private collection). The countless images of the salt marsh he painted were to become uniquely the artist’s own. In Boston from 1861–63, Heade was probably introduced to the marshes of Newburyport by the local resident, the Reverend James Cooley Fletcher, in 1862.
Fletcher, an amateur naturalist, had travelled to Brazil, and undoubtedly suggested Heade’s journey to South America in 1863; although Church’s trips to that continent in 1853 and 1857 would also have been a major factor. In Brazil Heade painted his first paintings of hummingbirds which were intended to be used to illustrate a proposed volume of chromolithographs, The Gems of Brazil. The following year he was awarded the Order of the Rose by Dom Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil. Heade returned to South America from 1866–67 and made a third trip in 1870.
In the 1860s, Heade painted a number of ominous and haunting marine canvases and by 1871 had begun to integrate orchids and passion flowers into his paintings of hummingbirds. In the 1870s Heade made two trips west, to British Columbia in 1872 and to California in 1875. The painter moved to St Augustine, Florida, in 1883, where he married for the first time. His late flower painting of lotuses, magnolias and roses often exhibit a latent sensuality; Heade also returned to his themes of marsh scenes of hummingbirds and orchids, painting until his death on 4 September 1904 in St. Augustine at the age of eighty-five.
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