Martin Johnson Heade 1819 - 1904

Victor D. Spark, New York
Private Collection, Detroit, Michigan, 1956 (acquired from the above)
By descent in the family to the present owners

Newark, New Jersey, The Newark Museum, Far Away Places, 1956

Very good, original condition. Unlined, surface dirt overall, under UV: no apparent inpainting.
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Martin Johnson Heade's life-long interest in the natural world, particularly tropical hummingbirds, prompted the artist to visit Brazil in September of 1863. As Heade confessed to his readers in an 1892 column, "From early boyhood I have been almost a monomaniac on hummingbirds" (Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., The Life and Works of Martin Johnson Heade, 1975, p. 129). This boyhood enthrallment remained with the artist through his early years and formal studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, culminating with his trips to Europe where he honed his growing versatility with a wide range of subject.

By the early nineteenth century, the Romantic Movement reverberated across Europe and America, generating a widespread and intense interest in surveying the natural world. While the belief in a fundamental connection between man and nature first manifested itself in the writings of naturalists Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin, their work inspired artists such as Frederic Church, George Catlin and Martin Johnson Heade to visit and paint the exotic landscape of South America.

After Heade arrived in Brazil, he penned his impressions in his journal: "There is probably no country where a person interested in ornithology, entomology, botany, mineralogy or beautiful scenery could find so much to keep him entertained" (Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., The Life and Works of Martin Johnson Heade, 1975, p. 71). Heade spent the next two years focused on his beloved hummingbirds, documenting their plumage, habits, environments and diets in notebooks, sketches and paintings. With an eye to the commercial success of John James Audubon's Birds of America, Heade intended to publish an album of chromolithographs based on his paintings, titled The Gems of Brazil. Though Heade was unable to secure the necessary 200 subscribers required to fund the publication, his paintings, which were to serve as templates for the project, achieved great commercial success. Exhibitions of the works in South America and London were so well-received and the paintings so sought-after by collectors that the artist would go on to produce approximately 45 canvases focusing on hummingbirds.

A Pair of Nesting Crimson Topaz Hummingbirds depicts a male and female crimson topaz, which according to Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., are "...a large, colorful species that was one of the painter's favorites" (The Life and Work of Martin Johnson Heade: A Critical Analysis and Catalogue Raisonné, 2000, p. 303). Heade places the birds in a mountainous environment surrounded by indigenous flora and fauna. Clouds, which reveal traces of blue sky, hover over the mountains and enhance the atmospheric mood of the landscape.