He began his
professional career as a portrait artist while still in his twenties,
supporting himself while traveling to France, Italy and England to
study and to refine his skills. In the 1850's, Heade abruptly changed
course. He moved to New York City where he acquired a studio in the
Tenth Street Studio Building, near landscape painters Frederic Edwin
Church, John C. Kensett, and Fitz Hugh Lane. He gave up portraiture
and began to experiment with landscapes and shore scenes. A deep reverence
for nature attracted him to the Luminist school of painting and, along
with Kensett, Lane and Sanford Gifford, Martin Heade became a key
figure in this movement. These artists experimented with colored light
as it affects the atmosphere of a painting. Luminism, in its concern
with the effect of light, is now seen as a precursor of Impressionism.
Heade's shore scenes and landscapes are rich in color, and convey
a mood by color contrasts and elongated forms, though they forsake
realistic detailing.
Heade's interest in hummingbirds has been characterized as an obsession.
In 1863, he went to Brazil to prepare the illustrations for a book
that was never published. By the 1870's, he had a number of paintings
in various combinations of orchids and hummingbirds, all in the luminist
style. He moved to St. Augustine, Florida in 1885 painting seascapes
and birds until he died, nineteen years later, in 1904.
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