Martin Johnson Heade New York/California (1819-1904) WHITE BLOSSOMS ON SPRIG gouache, framed, signed: lower right, M. Heade sight size: H4 3/4" W6 1/2" *Artist biography: Martin Johnson Heade was born August 11, 1819, in rural Lumberville, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. At the age of twenty-two he went to Italy and England and began a career as a portrait painter, but his attention quickly turned to the landscape. He opened a studio in New York (1843) and four years later he opened a studio in Philadelphia and exhibited SLEEPY FISHERMEN at the American Art Union (1847) and in St. Louis (1852). In 1853 he invested in Chicago real estate and then returned to Trenton, New Jersey until 1959. From 1859-1866 he worked out of The Old Tenth Street Studio at 15 West Tenth Street in New York City and he occasionally worked in Boston's Studio Building, finishing paintings from sketches he had made of the coastline in and around Newport, Rhode Island, Lake Champlain and Fryeburg, Maine. From 1843-1890 he exhibited at the NAD and elsewhere. In 1863, Heade's interests in ornithology, entomology, botany and scenery culminated when he accompanied naturalist Reverend J.C. Fletcher to Brazil in hopes of illustrating a book titled THE GEMS OF BRAZIL (of hummingbirds of South America) but the book never was published due to printing problems with chromolithographs. Nevertheless, his birds and flowers were exhibited in Rio de Janeiro and the Emperor Don Pedro II presented Heade with the Order of the Rose. In 1865 Heade sold the group of paintings to Sir Morton Peto and traveled to Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Panama, Jamaica and throughout the United States to sketch and paint. He settled in St. Augustine, Florida in 1881 and died there September 4, 1904. The artist received the Medaille d'Honneur, La Haye prior to 1870 (no record) and two medals in Boston (1874, 1878) after exhibiting at the Athenaeum. Heade is best known for his paintings of orchids, hummingbirds, Florida sunsets, haystacks near winding rivers and marshfield meadows, tropical marshes, cherokee roses, water lilies, magnolias and cattle. Stebbins calls Heade "a romantic masquerading as a realist." From September 29, 1999 through January 17, 2000 the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston held a Martin Johnson Heade exhibition and a book by Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr. accompanied it. The MFA previously held Heade solo exhibitions in 1969 and 1975.