Martin Johnson Heade was born August 11, 1819, in rural Lumberville (Bucks County, PA). At the age of twenty-two he went to Italy and England and began a career as a portrait painter but his attention quickly turned to the landscape. He opened a studio in New York (1843) and four years later he opened a studio in Philadelphia and exhibited Sleepy Fishermen at the American Art Union (1847) and in St. Louis (1852). In 1853 he invested in Chicago real estate and then returned to Trenton (NJ, 1856-59).

From 1859-1866 he worked out of “The Old Tenth Street Studio” at 15 West Tenth Street in NYC and he occasionally worked in Boston’s Studio Building finished paintings from sketches he had made of the coastline in and around Newport (RI), Lake Champlain and Fryeburg (ME). From 1843-1890 he exhibited at the NAD and elsewhere.

In 1863, Heade’s interests in ornithology, entomology, botany and scenery culminated when he accompanied naturalist Reverend J.C. Fletcher to Brazil in hopes to illustrated a book titled The Gems of Brazil (of hummingbirds of South American) but the books never was published due to printing problems with chromolithographs. Nevertheless, his birds and flowers were exhibited in Rio de Janeiro and the Emperor Don Pedro II presented Heade with the Order of the Rose. In 1865 Heade sold the group of paintings to Sir Morton Peto and traveled to Columbia, Peru, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Panama, Jamaica and throughout the U.S. to sketch and paint. He settled in St. Augustine (FL) in 1881 and died there September 4, 1904

The artist received the Medaille d’Honneur, La Haye prior to 1870 (no record) and two medals in Boston (1874, 1878) after exhibiting at the Athenaeum.

Heade is best known for his paintings of orchids, hummingbirds, Florida sunsets, haystacks near winding rivers and marshfield meadows, tropical marshes, cherokee roses, water lilies, magnolias and cattle near hay saddles.  Stebbins calls Heade “a romantic masquerading as a realist.”

From September 29,1999 through January 17, 2000 the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston) held a “Martin Johnson Heade” exhibition and a book by Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr. accompanied it. The MFA previously held Heade solo exhibitions in 1969 and 1975.

Bibliography: McIntyre, Robert C., Martin Johnson Heade (NY: 1948); “Commemorative Exhibition, Paintings by Martin J. Heade & Fitz Hugh Lane,” M. Knoedler & Co., NYC, 1954; “Martin Johnson Heade, 1819-1904,” exhibition catalogue, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1955; “Martin Johnson Heade,” exh. Cat., The Cummer Gallery of Art, Jacksonville (1981 touring); Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., The Life Work of Martin Johnson Heade (Yale Univ. Press, 1975)