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Preview image of work. oil on canvas,  Newburyport Marshes: Passing Storm 5682
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1964.45

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Newburyport Marshes: Passing Storm

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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.

Keywords: landscape (representation)