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29

Another owner MARTIN JOHNSON HEADE (1819-1904) Sunset on the Marshes signed "M.J. Heade" (lo...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:200,000.00 - 300,000.00 USD
Another owner MARTIN JOHNSON HEADE (1819-1904) Sunset on the Marshes signed M.J. Heade (lo...
Another owner
MARTIN JOHNSON HEADE
(1819-1904)
Sunset on the Marshes
signed "M.J. Heade" (lower right)
oil on canvas laid down on masonite
15 1/8 x 30 1/4 in. (38.4 x 76.8 cm)
painted circa 1875 <p>Estimate: $200,000-300,000 <p> Provenance
Private Collection, California <p> This painting will be included in the forthcoming revised edition of the Martin Johnson Heade catalogue raisonné by Dr. Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr. <p> For all his adult life, Heade loved the salt marshes along the coasts and estuaries of the Eastern United States. His paintings of marshes form by far the largest part of his oeuvre. Where other artists might depict America's forests, mountains, and great river valleys, Heade preferred the humbler, life-giving expanses of river and grass that serve as a buffer between sea and land. <p> The marsh's salt hay sustained both the New England farmer and the Florida cattle rancher. Its creeks and rivers teemed with fish; its grasses concealed a wide array of waterfowl. For Heade, an avid hunter and fisherman, the marsh was not only a source of bounty; it was also a private retreat, a place where life could be slowed to the unhurried pace of a flat-bottomed boat. <p>Although Heade painted marshes from Massachusetts and Rhode Island to New Jersey and Florida, his marsh scenes are never views of a specific place. They are instead topographically generic, their unrelenting flatness broken by haystacks or an occasional tree, their depths defined by meandering ribbons of water. <p>Above all, these paintings are defined by their skies, and thus by the character of the sunlight that permeates the humidity rising from the marsh. A favorite time of day for Heade is evening, when the glow of the setting sun, deepened by the layer of hanging moisture, reflects not only off the clouds but also in the pools and creeks that dot the landscape. It is a time of day when the marsh's beauty and mystery are most fully revealed. <p>In almost all of Heade's marsh paintings, there is some evidence of man's presence in the landscape. Sunset on the Marshes, painted in the mid-1870s, is unusual in its total absence of any sign of human intervention. Its mood is elegiac. In an otherwise untrammeled landscape, a solitary green heron - nature's own fisherman- stands in the pool on the right, basking in the sun's final moment of brilliance before the fall of night. <p>We are grateful to Dr. Bruce Chambers for cataloguing this lot.
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