Two Cherokee Rose Blossoms on a Table

Martin Johnson Heade fits awkwardly into American art history, which is part of what makes him interesting. He painted salt marshes obsessively, dozens of them, low horizons and haystacks under changing light. He also travelled to Brazil and produced a series of hummingbirds among orchids, intended for a book of chromolithographs that never appeared. Those two bodies of work seem to belong to different painters. The marshes are quiet and horizontal, closer to Luminism than to the grand Hudson River School vistas his contemporaries favoured. The tropical pictures are vertical, dense and strange, with the birds rendered by someone who had watched them closely. He worked without much recognition and was largely forgotten after his death in 1904. Interest revived in the middle of the twentieth century, and the storm scenes over Narragansett Bay now read as some of the most unsettling American landscapes of their period.