Elizabeth Meyer
Head of Auction Administration
PROPERTY FROM A DISTINGUISHED PRIVATE COLLECTION
Lot 20¤
Martin Johnson Heade(1819-1904)Seascape at Sunset 10 1/4 x 20 1/4in
22 November 2016, 14:00 EST
New YorkSold for US$271,500 inc. premium
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Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904)
Seascape at Sunset
signed 'M.J. Heade' (lower right)
oil on canvas
10 1/4 x 20 1/4in
Painted circa mid-1860s.
signed 'M.J. Heade' (lower right)
oil on canvas
10 1/4 x 20 1/4in
Painted circa mid-1860s.
Footnotes
Provenance
John Hull Brown.
Sale, Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, April 29, 1976, lot 46.
Private collection, New Jersey.
Questroyal Fine Art, New York, 2008.
Acquired by the present owner from the above, 2008.
Exhibited
Montclair, New Jersey, Montclair Art Museum, A Love Affair: 50 Years of Collecting American Art, September 18-October 30, 1988, n.p., no. 22.
Literature
T.E. Stebbins, Jr., The Life and Works of Martin Johnson Heade: A Critical Analysis and Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven, Connecticut, 2000, p. 263, no. 249, illustrated.
Questroyal Fine Art, Important American Paintings, Volume IX, Fall 2008, exhibition catalogue, New York, 2008, n.p., pl. 25, illustrated.
Martin Johnson Heade, who prided himself on originality, embraced a variety of subjects through his lengthy career with unrivaled enthusiasm and dedication. While many Hudson River School artists shared inspiration found in locations and place-subjects, Heade was divergent. He gave equal opportunity to both landscape and still-life themes and he explored niches within those categories in depth, allowing experimentation with important elements like light and color on a broad scale. Some of his most comprehensive themes include the artist's famous marsh subjects, hummingbirds, floral still-lifes, and, as in the case of the present work, marine imagery.
By regularly revisiting marine imagery through his career, Heade was able to perfect his dramatic, storm-forming skies and settle into a more vivid range of atmosphere, as represented in the present work, Seascape at Sunset. While very few of the Heade's pictures are dated, Seascape at Sunset was originally assigned the circa date of 1876 to 1883 by scholar Theodore E. Stebbins. After a more recent review of the painting in 2007, Dr. Stebbins wrote a letter re-dating the present work as follows, "In the book, I date the work c. 1876-1883, but now that I have had a chance to examine it more closely, I am inclined to think it is probably a work from around the mid 1860's." He goes on to note, "I say this because it is a crisply executed painting, with a cheerful tone rather than the sadder mood of many of the artist's marine compositions."
Dr. Stebbins assessment on the crisp execution of this work and its cheerful tone are quite adept. The painting captures all of the warm, joyful and calming colors one would expect to find in a later summer sunset while very clearly defining the shoreline and rocky foreground. The present work in oil is rendered on a thickly woven canvas. Dr. Stebbins speculates in the same letter, "One wonders why Heade used a relatively course canvas for this refined work. I can only guess that he was at a distance from his usual source of materials, and thus perhaps not working on Narragansett Bay, but may have been in Maine or elsewhere." Regardless of location, Heade's Seascape at Sunset is a universally successful rendering of the artist's most careful and colorful marine pictures.
