Martin Johnson Heade

Henry Morrison Flagler, Palm Beach, Florida (acquired directly from the artist)

George Sidney Prindle, Washington, D.C. (acquired as a gift from the above)

Private Collection, Washington, D.C. (by descent from the above)

Weschler's, Washington, D.C., 7 December 1986, lot 1292 (consigned by the above)

Charles Sterling, Philadelphia

Richard Nash, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan

Island Weiss Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above in December 1996 by the present owner

Ithaca, New York, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University and Poughkeepsie, New York, Vassar College, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, A Focused Collection: The Hudson River School, April - October 2007, no. 10, pp. 4, 5, 24 and 25, illustrated in color

Margaret B. Caldwell, "Weschler's December Auction in Washington, D.C.," Maine Antique Digest, February 1987, p. 18-C, illustrated

Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., The Life and Work of Martin Johnson Heade: A Critical Analysis and Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven 2000, no. 315, p. 280, illustrated

Roberta Smith Favis, Martin Johnson Heade in Florida, Gainesville, Florida 2003, fig. 52, pp. 95 and 96, illustrated

Heade painted Florida Marsh: Dawn after moving to St. Augustine, Florida in 1883. Forty miles south of present-day Jacksonville, St. Augustine had been originally settled by Spanish colonists, founded by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés in 1565. Despite his relocation, Heade remained somewhat peripatetic in the 1880s: traveling around Florida to Jacksonville, Palatka, Enterprise, Ocala, and Waldo, and to Charleston, South Carolina and even back to the East Coast. From 1887 until his death, Heade settled in a studio behind the Hotel Ponce de Leon, a Spanish Renaissance Revival building developed by Henry Morrison Flagler, a founder of Standard Oil, the Florida East Coast Railway, as well as the cities of Miami and Ft. Lauderdale. Heade’s most important patron, Flager commissioned two major works from the artist in 1887 for $2,000 each: The Great Florida Sunset and View from Fern-Tree Walk, Jamaica. 

Flagler’s commission demonstrates the context for Heade’s landscaping painting to be conceived in pairs. In fact, Florida Marsh: Dawn forms a pendant with Northern Marsh: Sunset (lot 21 in the present sale). Flagler commissioned the set, and gifted them to George Sidney Prindle, in whose family the paintings remained for much of the twentieth century until they were auctioned at Weschler’s in Washington, D.C. Occasionally in the literature, the paintings have been subtitled “Old Life in New England”  and “New Life in Florida.” Indeed, as the sun set on one phase of Heade’s life in the North, the resplendent Florida landscape and Flagler’s patronage dawned a new one in Florida.