Martin Johnson Heade 1819 - 1904

Kennedy Quarterly, December 1962, illustrated
Ian Bennett, A History of American Painting, London, 1973, p. 88, fig. 91, illustrated, also illustrated as frontispiece
Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., The Life and Works of Martin Johnson Heade, New Haven, Connecticut, 1975, p. 151, fig. 82, illustrated, p. 267, no. 284, illustrated
Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., The Life and Works of Martin Johnson Heade: A Critical Analysis and Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven, Connecticut, 2000, p. 321, no. 488, illustrated

Martin Johnson Heade's good friend and Tenth Street Studio Building neighbor, Frederic Church, went to South America and came back to paint spectacular landscapes, among them - Heart of the Andes (1859) and Cotopaxi (1862). In 1863, Heade also headed south, but with a far different agenda. On August 12, 1863, the Boston Transcript informed its readers that:

M.J. Heade . . . is about to visit Brazil, to paint those winged jewels, the hummingbirds. . . . It is his intention in Brazil to depict the richest and most brilliant of the hummingbird family, - about which he is so great an enthusiast. . . .He is only fulfilling the dream of his boyhood in doing so (as quoted by Janet L. Comey, in Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., Martin Johnson Heade [1999], "Tropical Landscapes," p. 49, and "The Gems of Brazil", p. 71).

It was characteristic of Heade to travel the same general path as his fellow artists, but then to veer off in ways that were unusual and entirely his own. The artist had been an avid sportsman, a hunter of birds and small game and a fisherman, all his life, a passion on a par with his art making. From 1880 until 1883 and again from 1891 until his death in 1904, Heade was a regular contributor to Forest and Stream (forerunner of Field and Stream) writing columns and letters using the pen name "Didymus." While, the bulk of Heade's published work consists of commentary and opinion on issues of concern to sportsmen, and particularly Heade's intense opposition to private hunting and fishing preserves, fully ten columns deal with hummingbirds, including one in 1900 entitled "Bringing Up Hummingbirds on the Bottle." In a column of 1892, Heade confessed to his readers, "From early boyhood I have been almost a monomaniac on hummingbirds" (as quoted in Stebbins, 1975, p. 129). The fascination endured. Heade's very last column for Forest and Stream published on August 6, 1904, a month before his death, was entitled "Hummingbirds." A surviving photograph of Mrs. Heade, in St. Augustine, shows her feeding a pet hummingbird who perches on a feeder in her hand as her husband looks on (Stebbins, 1975, figs. 99 and 100).  

It is likely that Heade's trip to Brazil was facilitated by a friend from Newburyport, Massachusetts, the Reverend James Cooley Fletcher (1823-1901). Fletcher was not only a fellow naturalist, but also a diplomat who had served as acting Secretary to the U. S. Legation at Rio de Janeiro in 1852-3 and then collaborated on an 1857 book, Brazil and the Brazilians.  Fletcher had befriended the emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro II (1825-1891), an enlightened ruler who cultivated friendships with an international community of scientists and artists. Thus Heade probably traveled to Brazil well prepared with introductions and with a clear purpose in mind. Heade remained in Brazil from September 1863 to April of 1864. In March, Emperor Dom Pedro awarded him the Brazilian Order of the Rose. When Heade departed Brazil, he had studied the country's hummingbirds both in their native habitat and on the dissecting table. He left the tropics with specimens of birds to use in his studio, including some which were native to other regions of South America. While Heade continued to paint hummingbirds set against background landscapes, he also made two more trips to South and Central America in 1866 and 1870, increasing his artistic vocabulary with observation and sketches of birds, flowers and the surrounding landscape. 

After 1870 Heade's hummingbirds shared his canvases with tropical flowers, painted as co-equal foci of attention with the birds. There is speculation that this reflected a Darwinian awareness on Heade's part of the inextricable complimentarity of all animal, vegetal and mineral creation. After painting a series of hummingbird and passion flower canvases, Heade turned his attention to orchids.  Orchids grew in lush profusion in Brazil, where Heade certainly saw them, and were avidly cultivated in England and America. Still, the flower was a problematic choice for an artist. "The orchid was not considered a proper subject for art, since it carried with it an unmistakably dangerous aura of sexuality" (Stebbins, 1975, p. 138). William Gerdts notes that in Victorian times, with its widely understood vocabulary of flower symbolism, "the orchid . . . does not figure in the language of flower literature; this bloom dared not speak" (Painters of the Humble Truth, 1981, p. 126). Heade was not deterred.

Orchids and Hummingbirds is one of about fifty-five known such compositions by Heade.  Stebbins describes the present painting as typical of Heade's mature refinement of the theme.

He settled on a horizontal composition . . . with a single Cattleya labiata (plus perhaps a bud or an old blossom) and a pair of hummingbirds; he grew particularly fond of the elegant long-tailed Thaumastura corae (Cora's shear-tail). Moreover, he no longer dramatically outlined his flowers and buds, whereas his natural landscape grew tranquil and was shrouded in quiet mist. An overall pink tonality . . . bestows a mellow, sensual calm upon the scene. (1975, pp. 151-2). 

The hummingbird on the left is a Thaumastura cora, or Peruvian shear-tail, while the bird on the right is a Calliphlox amethystina, or an amethyst woodstar. The orchids in this picture are Cattleya labiata, the genus that Heade most commonly painted. It was first discovered by Europeans growing wild in Brazil in 1818 who named it for an eminent English horticulturalist, Sir William Cattley. These birds and flowers, set against a tropical wilderness of foliage, mountains and lake, dominate the canvas, looming large in a world that belongs to them, far distant from the experience or daily concerns of the artist or his audience.  In Stebbins' succinct summarization: "These works combine traditional features of both landscape and still life along with elements of ornithological and botanical illustration.  One seeks in vain for direct precedents for these astonishing works within either American or European art" (1999, p. 8).