MARTIN JOHNSON HEADE 1819-1904
Salt Marsh Hay, c. 1865
Oil on canvas, 13 X 26" (33.02 x 66.04 cm.)
Signed, lower left
Museum purchase, 955-0-121

The marsh is a unique landscape, and Martin Johnson Heade made it his special province. Why and how he did gives us an insight into the turbulent state of the nation in the Civil War period and its aftermath. Salt Marsh Hay is one of just a handful of paintings by Heade, in a very prolific career, to combine this favored landscape subject with stark storm imagery. He did not come to paint the marsh immediately, but only after working his way through the more conventional portraits, genre scenes, and seascapes that occupied his early career through the 1840s and 1850s. Born in Lumberville, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, on the Delaware River, he grew up familiar with vistas of trees and water. Unsettled travel would dominate much of his life, and that restlessness appears to have found perfect expression in the undulating and constantly changing marshscapes, first in New England, later in New Jersey, and finally in central Florida. After an early trip to Europe, he returned to the New York area, with trips in the 1850s to Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Chicago, and during the early 1860s to the north shore of Boston and then to South America; 1865 found him in London and shortly after in the Low Countries. His search for a personal subject matter coincided directly with the profound and unsettling disruptions of national civil strife, and while his thunderstorm images are not necessarily direct correlation's to specific historical events of the period, they surely cannot be separated from the pervasive trauma artists, no less than citizens at large, must have felt.
During the early and mid- 1860s, Heade and other contemporaries such as Fitz Hugh Lane, Frederic E. Church, William Bradford, Albert Bierstadt, and Alfred Thomas Bricher took up the related themes of breaking storms, shipwrecks, violent sunsets, and suggestive cross images. The most celebrated and published examples by Heade include The Coming Storm (1859, The Metropolitan Museum of Art), Approaching Storm: Beach Near Newport (c. 1865-1870, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), and Thunderstorm over Narragansett Bay (1868, Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth). Soon after beginning these marine scenes he turned to his first marsh landscapes, and on the basis of the few dated works among them, Salt Marsh Hay can be firmly set in a sequence of the mid-1860s. Closely related pictures which place it in context are Gathering Hay Before a Thunderstorm (specifically dated 1862, private collection), along with Newburyport Marshes: Passing Storm (c. 1865-1875, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Me.), Sudden Shower: Newbury Marshes (c. 1865-1875, Yale University Art Gallery), Marsh in a Thunderstorm (c. 1860-1870, The Governor's Mansion, Atlanta), and Jersey Meadows, Sun Breaking Through (c. 1865-1875, private collection).
Of all this landscape group, Salt Marsh Hay is one of the starkest, focusing attention, as in Thunderstorm over Narragansett Bay, on the black mirror reflection in the middle of the composition. This increases our sense of an almost surreal world held in a tension of oppositions about to shatter in noise and light. Where Heade's marshes before and after this period were painted in cool greens and yellows, and either bright sparkling daylight or dreamy twilights, here he purposefully exploits impenetrable blacks, acid greens, and ghostly whites. Throughout his life he painted in series, but given his large output over a long career, his variations on such favored subjects as hummingbirds, flower blossoms, and marsh haystacks were often as much repetitions as they were fresh and individual versions. While elements of the Butler institute's picture dominate other paintings of this time, Salt Marsh Hay clearly stands out with its own memorable distillation of forms. The location is most likely the Newburyport meadows, with their flat expanses and broad curving streams, seen here at high water. During the later decades of the nineteenth century, farmers had a productive business in the harvesting of salt hay from these marshes for cattle feed. But the narrative of those activities is only incidental to Heade's concentration on the drama of barometric pressure and the impending changes in nature's moods. In Salt Marsh Hay, Heade heightens both the visual focus and psychological intensity by isolating in the smoky light the one illuminated haystack. This he counterpoints twice: in its own duller reflection below and by the dark stack shrouded in shadow at the right.
This great simplicity of design seems paradoxically, at once serene and threatening, a balancing of sensibilities as subtle as the close range of lights and darks in the composition. Holding it all together are the sweeping foreshortened arcs of the marsh shoreline, which rhythmically carry our eye back and forth from the foreground across the flat plane of water and grass to the dense stormy horizon, where sky and earth fuse in blackness. As controlled as the
whole might appear, we must finally remember that the marsh is the one landscape in constant flux. In fact, it is literally half land, half water, with its composition shifting from one to the other and back approximately every six hours in the changing tides. These inexorable, virtually unseen, currents are but another reminder of nature's charged forces, like the building storm, which reveal something of both a restless artist and a restive nation.

JOHN WILMERDING