MARTIN JOHNSON HEADE, Sunset Over the Marsh

Private Collection, New York, circa 1950
By descent in the family to the present owner

The solitary salt marshes along the eastern seaboard were among Martin Johnson Heade’s favorite and most highly acclaimed subjects, accounting for nearly one-fifth of the works he executed during his career.  Beginning in 1859, the artist began to paint the flatlands of Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut, then, during the following decade, turned his attention to the wetlands of New Jersey.  Heade studied the marshes at all hours of the day and in all different types of atmospheric conditions, particularly favoring the transitory effects of passing storms and the momentary drama of sunlight breaking through clouds. Theodore Stebbins writes, “Why paint the marsh?  First, Heade demanded of himself originality, and, though the marsh was familiar and ubiquitous, it was a new subject for the American painter.  Equally important, the marsh was simply a place Heade loved: on the one hand it represented untouched nature—an ideal place for hunting and fishing—and on the other it was a natural farmland, where hay was harvested and stacked.  If Heade was an intermediary figure between the Hudson River School and the next generation, then too the marsh might be seen as an intermediate landscape that lies somewhere between wilderness and the pastoral” (Martin Johnson Heade, Boston, Massachusetts, 1999, p. 29).

Heade moved to New York in 1859, where he began to work at the Tenth Street Studio Building and became acquainted with the artist Frederic Church.  Robert Hughes observes, “This relationship was decisive for his work: Church showed Heade how expressive light on landscape could be.  Instead of seeking out grandiose panoramas, Heade made a number of sketching trips to the coastal salt marshes of Massachusetts, New Jersey and Rhode Island: a flat landscape of boggy ground and tidal channels, where salt hay was gathered in round stacks.  Heade’s paintings of this unpromising scene could be hauntingly beautiful.  He chose a low horizon line to stress the pure place of the sky, usually in a calm sunset; and under its benign light, the haystacks act as spatial markers.  The result is a very minimal landscape, wide and low, in which space and interval are used with the utmost deliberation, and each element—the loaves of hay, a wedge of reflective water, the sky’s dominant rectangle—acquires a perfect clarity.  They are the images in American art closest to those of European Romantics like Caspar David Friedrich, with the same sense of quiet awe at boundless space; light turns matter into spirit.  Horizontality equals sublimity” (American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America, New York, 1997, p. 170).

Painted in 1904, Sunset over Newburyport Meadows is one of two marsh landscapes dated in the last year of Heade's life.