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.