1964.45
Newburyport Marshes: Passing Storm
Artist
Martin Johnson Heade
(Lumberville, Pennsylvania, 1819 - 1904, Saint Augustine, Florida)
Title
Newburyport Marshes: Passing Storm
Creation Date
ca. 1865-1870
Century
19th century
Dimensions
15 1/8 in. x 30 1/4 in. (38.42 cm x 76.84 cm)
Object Type
painting
Creation Place
North America, United States, Massachusetts
Medium and Support
oil on canvas
Credit Line
Museum Purchase, with the aid of the Sylvia E. Ross Fund
Copyright
Public Domain
Accession Number
1964.45
Martin Johnson Heade’s views of the salt marshes near Newburyport, Massachusetts, are among his finest works. In these paintings, Heade took the same basic elements—haystacks, flat marshland, a glassy river, and open sky—and arranged them in different ways to achieve a series of harmoniously balanced, horizontal compositions. For a nation torn apart by the Civil War, Heade’s salt marsh landscape offered a vision of nature inhabited by an orderly and benevolent deity in which only the passing rain cloud alludes to the nation’s troubles. Heade was less well-known in his day than other Hudson River School painters, yet his work has enjoyed wide critical praise since its rediscovery in the 1940s.