Martin Johnson Heed was born to a farmer and mill owner in 1819 in Lumberville, a small village near Doylestown, Pennsylvania. He first studied art under the Quaker artists, Edward and Thomas Hicks. In 1840 he took a trip to Europe, spending two years studying in Rome. Upon his return he moved to New York and changed the spelling of his name to Heade.
Heade began his career as a portraitist, but
...see more » in the 1850s he changed to landscape and experimented with the effects of light on a painting. He was part of the Luminist School of Painting, a popular movement at that time and considered a stage in the development of impressionism. He moved to Brazil for a few years where he produced many paintings of birds and flowers. Heade was fascinated by hummingbirds and raised and tamed them for over fifty years. His artwork depicting birds and flowers is compared to that of Audubon and Gould.
Throughout the 1860s and 1880s, Heade's landscapes were some of the best at capturing nature's remote beauty in what are called the Hudson River School of painting. Heade exhibited widely throughout the East and in London, but achieved only moderate recognition. Interest in his paintings was revived during the 1940s as part of a Hudson River School of painting revival.
In 1883, Heade married and moved to St. Augustine, Florida where he continued to work and paint landscapes and floral art until his death in 1904. In his last twenty years, he painted the tropical flora in Florida. His work can be found in collections of major museums and galleries, namely the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. There was a traveling exhibition of his work in 2000 and in 2004 the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp in his honor. His work is also available from retailers around the world.« see less
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