MARTIN JOHNSON HEADE, The Shipwreck

When Martin Johnson Heade moved to New York in 1858, he shifted away from painting portraits and genre subjects, and painted numerous seascapes during the next decade. Many of these marine pictures were shore scenes, with breaking waves. Though Frederic Edwin Church was likely his impetus for this, John Wilmerding has also suggested that Heade may have come into contact with either Fitz Henry Lane or the artist’s work in the early 1860s, as Heade’s style began to incorporate the haze on the water and rocky foreground common in Lane’s work.

In The Old Shipwreck, Heade has depicted the shore at low tide. The wrecked ship lists quietly in the background while two small children search for treasures in the wet sand, the ship’s broken mast lying next to them, covered in algae. Light sifts through the hazy sky as ships pass calmly in the distance. About Heade’s seascapes Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr. writes: “Heade liked the odd transitory moment when all is not perfect with the world. Whereas another artist would depict the shore at its best, and, if there were figures, would decorously dress and pose them, Heade evoked the smells of low tide, the grime of the seaweed and mud” (The Life and Works of Martin Johnson Heade, New Haven, Connecticut, and London, 1975, p. 67).