The current Holmes Gallery show at the Vero Beach Museum of Art features the work of a 19th century American whose work packs a velvet punch. “Nature Illuminated: Landscapes and Still Lifes by Heade and his Contemporaries” allows the quiet light of Martin Johnson Heade’s work to shine in the company of paintings by his predecessors, including Washington Allston and Thomas Doughty, as well as Heade’s contemporaries John Frederick Kensett, Fitz Henry Lane and Frederick Edwin Church.
Organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the exhibition was curated by Karen E. Quinn, formerly a curator in its Art of the Americas department.
Quinn’s 27 years at the MFA were devoted in large part to the study and interpretation of its Martin Johnson Heade collection, one of the largest holdings of works by that artist in the country. As a research fellow, Quinn worked with former Curator of American paintings Theodore Stebbins, one of the nation’s leading art scholars, and other colleagues to organize a Heade retrospective at the MFA in 1999. She was a key contributor to the expanded catalogue raisonné of Heade’s work that was published by the museum in the following year.
Quinn drew the current exhibition solely from the MFA’s collection.
“It was a big deal to have this exhibition travel. They had to rehang the galleries at the MFA,” she says, noting that many of the paintings had been on public display.
The inconvenience was worth it, she adds.
“It allowed this material to be seen not as a big, huge, retrospective, but as a gemlike focus on the work. And because we have Heade at the MFA from soup to nuts, all of the aspects of his painting career can be seen in this show.”
Heade, says Quinn, was a versatile, self-taught artist. The earliest work in the exhibition is a portrait from the 1840s, when Heade worked as an itinerant portrait painter in New England. In the 1850s he began to make a specialty of landscape, in particular the salt marshes of Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Jersey. Heade made three trips to Latin America between 1863 and 1870 where he sketched tropical landscapes, flowers and hummingbirds, from which he developed finished paintings for his unrealized book, Gems of Brazil.
Late in his career Heade moved to Florida, where he became known for his paintings of blossoming branches of magnolia resting on velvet-covered surfaces.
The current exhibition has examples of all of these.
Asked if there are pictures that visitors should pay special attention to, Quinn admits to having some favorites.
“When you live with a dead artist for as long as I have, you do develop relationships with certain works.”
Purposefully striding across the gallery in Vero last week, Quinn comes to a stop before “Salt Marshes, Newburyport, Massachusetts.”
“One of my favorites is this painting here,” she says of the verdant landscape dotted with haystacks. Here and there the ground is brilliantly lit by rays that pierce the gray clouds over the scene.
Through the study of the hills and rock formations in the painting, Quinn and her colleagues have determined the location of the scene.
“Today it is pretty much the way it is in the painting, because it’s part of a nature preserve near the town of Newbury,” she says.
Heade was not always faithful to the topography of the places he painted, she warns. Such is the case with a picture she “loves even more” than the Newbury scene, “Sunset on Long Beach.” Dating from around 1867, it’s believed to be a painting of a marsh on Long Island.
Calling attention to the delicacy of the paint handing in the work, Quinn notes Heade’s use of thin layers of translucent paint to depict the sinking sun and the radiant bellies of the serene clouds that float above it.
Not only is the painting’s subject exquisite; the canvas itself is in pristine condition.
“That’s one of the issues with Heade,” Quinn says.
She explains that many Heade paintings that have come on the market in recent times have been over cleaned –“really scrubbed,” as she puts it.
“So to have one in such beautiful condition shows you really how Heade worked.”
Of course all of the paintings on display in the exhibition are in beautiful condition. Many of them came to the MFA in the late 1940s through the generosity of one collector, Maxim Karolik, who was intent on buying the work of what he considered an underappreciated period in American art: 1815 to 1865.
While Heade’s work is the core of the current exhibition, Quinn says she “amplified” the artist’s genius by placing his paintings alongside comparable works by artists who preceded him, as well as those by his contemporaries.
For example, Heade’s “Approaching Storm: Beach at Newport,” from around 1861, can be experienced in proximity to Washington Allston’s “Rising of a Thunderstorm at Sea,” a work from 1814. The subject of Allston’s picture (worthy of a Turner or even a Rembrandt) is an angry sea on whose billows a handful of men strives to keep their tiny sailboat from foundering. The sky in the picture is diagonally divided between a storm front of dark clouds to the left, and a calm blue sky to the right.
Compared to Allston’s heroic man-against-nature-approach, Heade’s painting of a black sky above a slate-dark sea presents the calm before the storm. Quietly breaking onto the foreground shore, the sea presents a smooth surface to the distant sailboats that float upon it. The danger here is not immediate, but ominously disturbing nevertheless.
It might be argued, however, that nothing in Heade’s oeuvre is as portentous as his flower pieces. In this exhibition are four notable examples of Heade’s talent for portraying nature’s delicate balance of fragile beauty and vitality.
One of these is “Passion Flowers and Hummingbirds,” painted at some point between 1870 and 1883. Of Heade’s hummingbird and flower paintings, this is one of curator Quinn’s favorites.
“He only did about a dozen with passion flowers,” she says. “He did far more with orchids.”
This one, Quinn notes, is particularly evocative for the composition’s use of complementary red and green colors, and the way the blossoming passion flower vine snakes across the picture plane.
“It just brings you right in,” she says.
For many visitors, Heade’s pièce de résistance might be his “Magnolia Grandiflora” (about 1885-1895) from the series of flowers on velvet that he painted after moving to St. Augustine. This magnolia branch is couched on red velvet. He did a number of similar compositions on blue, green, and brown velvet.
But you don’t need to know those details to appreciate the range and beauty of Heade’s paintings, advises Quinn.
“Just allow yourself to sink into them,” she says.
“There’s something for everyone here.”
The exhibition is in Vero through June 5.
