Martin Johnson Heade & The Long View

Martin Johnson Heade, Sailing By Moonlight, c. 1860

Virtually unknown during his lifetime, Martin Johnson Heade is now recognized as one of the more innovative American landscape painters of the nineteenth century.

Martin Johnson Heade, Seascape, c. 1858

He's all about eerie color, contrast and mood. There's plenty that's unusual about Heade: he excelled both at emotive panoramic landscapes and precise renditions of exotic flora, despite being self-taught except for what he learned from primitive painter Ed Hicks.

Martin Johnson Heade, Blue Morpho Butterfly, 1864-5

As exotic as his subject matter could get, Heade painted hundreds of views of salt marshes, many in Newburyport, Massachusetts, which is not far from where I live.

Martin Johnson Heade, Salt Marsh, Newburyport, Mass. c. 1865

This is Lake George, a subject treated by dozens of artists, but Heade chose a little-known spot from which to paint it, and the tonal colors he used would be more at home in a desert.

The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has this landscape on display in their new American wing:

Martin Johnson Heade, April Showers, 1868

They point out that it's really a study of the storm clouds moving in the background. "Heade's real subject here is the shifting character of light in the rain," reads the MFA placard. "The air is moist and heavy, and Heade indicates the rain that falls in spots over the hills with delicate, shadowy plumes that look almost like smoke." Here's a closer look at the clouds:

Detail: Martin Johnson Heade, April Showers, 1868

And here's the foreground and middlegrounds - just look at all that detail.

Detail: Martin Johnson Heade, April Showers, 1868

The delicate colors and the light and shadows in this thing are what blow me away. What I guess I love about Heade is how he gives a ton of compositional space to the sky and still goes crazy precise with the details of things on the ground - even when the ground is nearly a flat plain - sort of mixing both ends of his talent's spectrum, I guess.

I'm trying an adaptation of that style myself in a series of landscapes I'm working on. Usually I'm content with the suggestion of detail in the areas that aren't the main focus, but I'm suddenly really interested in trying to paint detail for its own sake. I like the idea of a "big sky" composition that's sort of a fake-out- in that, despite occupying two-thirds of the canvas, in terms of detail the sky's not the main attraction, the ground is.

Montauk- painting in progress