Martin Johnson Heade
1819 - 1904
Born in Pennsylvania in 1819, Martin Johnson Heade, was taught figure painting by the Quaker “primitive” Edward Hicks and worked as a hack portraitist until the 1850's when he met and fell under the influence of Frederic Church and became a member of the later Hudson River School . Church showed him how expressive light in a landscape could be. But soon, rather than the romantic sweep and majestic scale of Church's work, Heade was painting minimalist landscapes of haunting beauty, joining a new group of painters. These artists used simple light, space, and an implicit silence to express, in the words of scholar Vincent Scully, “some enduring love of the soul's still voice”. In 1954, art critic John I.H. Baur christened this movement in nineteenth century landscape painting, “luminism”, for its key attribute, “the unique sense of light that seems to emanate from the painting itself.” The luminists opted for quietly austere works which, as critic Robert Hughes points out, focus on atmospheric effects rather than pictorial drama. Heade created, in Hughes's words, “a sense of quiet awe at boundless space; light turns matter into spirit.”
Just as the luminists moved to the forefront as the Hudson River School began to go out of style during the tumult of the Civil War, so too the luminists eventually gave way to the increasing popularity of the Barbizon-influenced, impressionistic style of landscape. When the public lost its taste for luminist landscapes, Heade, who had moved from the North Atlantic coast to Florida by that time, continued to use the same technique, but focused on floral still lifes, creating composition after composition of orchids and hummingbirds, roses, and giant magnolias. Set against a plain, uncluttered background, his flowers possessed an almost sculptural quality and were treated with the same delicate orchestration of light and color that had been true of his landscapes. In recent years these luminous works have been rediscovered to renewed appreciation and accorded major status in art circles.
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