Thomas Cole – Gallery 60 & Gallery 64
Frederic Edwin Church – Gallery 67
Jasper Francis Cropsey – Gallery 64
Thomas Doughty – Gallery 64
Sanford Robinson Gifford – Gallery 67 & Gallery 91
William Stanley Hasseltine – Gallery 65 & Gallery 67
Martin Johnson Heade – Gallery 65
John Frederick Kensett – Gallery 67
Worthington Whittredge – Gallery 67
Martin Johnson Heade (originally Heed) was born in Lumberville, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania on August 11, 1819. He received his earliest artistic training from the painter Edward Hicks (1780-1849) and perhaps had additional instruction from Hicks’ younger cousin Thomas, a portrait painter. The influence of these two artists is evident in Heade’s earliest works, which were most often portraits painted in a rather stiff and unsophisticated manner. Heade traveled abroad around 1838 (the precise date of this first European trip is uncertain), and settled in Rome for two years. He made his professional debut in 1841 when his Portrait of a Little Girl (present location unknown) was accepted for exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. In 1843 his Portrait of a Young Lady (present location unknown) was shown at New York’s National Academy of Design.
Following a second trip to Europe in 1848 Heade attained a somewhat greater artistic sophistication and began to exhibit more regularly. He moved frequently in the late 1840s and early 1850s, establishing a pattern of itinerancy that would persist throughout his life. Heade gradually concentrated less and less on portrait painting, and by the mid-1850s was starting to experiment with landscape painting. In 1859 he settled in New York, where he met Frederic Edwin Church, who became one of his few close friends in the American art world. Heade was drawn to coastal areas and began to specialize in seascapes and views of salt marshes; soon he was receiving praise for his ability to capture changing effects of light, atmosphere, and meteorological conditions.
In the late 1850s and early 1860s he began to experiment with still-life painting, an interest he would maintain for the rest of his career. He continued to travel in the eastern United States and then, in 1863, made the first of three trips to South America. Church had already been to the tropics twice, and his large-scale paintings of dramatic South American scenes had won him widespread fame and critical approval. Although Church encouraged his friend to seek out equally spectacular scenery for his own paintings, Heade was generally interested in more intimate and less dramatic views. While in Brazil in 1863 he undertook a series of small pictures called The Gems of Brazil (c. 1863-1864, Manoogian collection), showing brightly colored hummingbirds in landscape settings. He hoped to use these images in an elaborate illustrated book he planned to write about the tiny birds, but the project was never completed. Nevertheless, he maintained his interest in the subject and in the 1870s began to paint pictures combining hummingbirds with orchids and other flowers in natural settings. During these years he continued to paint marsh scenes, seascapes, still lifes, and the occasional tropical landscape.
In later life Heade’s wanderings took him to various spots, including British Columbia and California. Never fully accepted by the New York art establishment–he was, for instance, denied membership in the Century Association and was never elected an associate of the National Academy of Design–Heade eventually settled in Saint Augustine, Florida, in 1883. He was married that same year and at last enjoyed a reasonably stable domestic and professional existence. He also formed the first productive relationship of his career with a patron, the wealthy oil and railroad magnate Henry Morrison Flagler, who would commission and purchase several dozen pictures over the next decade. Heade continued to paint subjects that he had previously specialized in, such as orchids and hummingbirds, but he now also turned his attention to Florida marsh and swamp scenes and still lifes of cut magnolia leaves and flowers. Heade and his work were largely forgotten by the time of his death on in St. Augustine on September 4, 1904, and it was only with the general revival of interest in American art in the 1940s that attention was once again turned to him and his reputation restored. [This is an edited version of the artist’s biography published, or to be published, in the NGA Systematic Catalogue]
Cattleya Orchid and Three Hummingbirds – 1871 – Gallery 65
Giant Magnolias on a Blue Cloth
Narragansett Bay – 1864 – Gallery 65
William Stanley Haseltine was born in Philadelphia on June 11, 1835, the son of John Haseltine, a successful businessman, and his wife Elizabeth Shinn Haseltine, an amateur landscape painter. After two years of study at the University of Pennsylvania, he entered Harvard University in 1852, receiving his degree two years later. He studied painting briefly in 1854 with Paul Weber, a German landscape and portrait painter who had settled in Philadelphia. In the spring of 1855 Haseltine made his public debut as an artist, exhibiting several paintings at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. That summer he journeyed to Düsseldorf, where he joined the colony of young American painters studying landscape painting at the Academy. In 1856 Haseltine joined Worthington Whittredge (1820-1910) and a group of fellow students on an extended sketching trip up the Rhine and into Switzerland and Italy. Although in January 1857 Haseltine returned to Düsseldorf, he was back in Italy by the summer and settled in Rome in the fall. During the winter of 1857-1858 and the spring of 1858 he made numerous sketching tours in the environs of Rome and also visited the island of Capri.
In the late summer or early fall of 1858 Haseltine abruptly returned to Philadelphia. By November of the following year he had moved to New York and taken a studio in the Tenth Street Studio Building, which was the center of American landscape school in the late 1850s and early 1860s. Among the painters Haseltine joined in the Studio Building were Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, and Whittredge, the latter two acquaintances from his European travels. Haseltine now began to establish a reputation as a landscape painter, showing his works regularly at exhibitions in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Many of his works of these years were based on sketches completed abroad, but he also made use of studies made on his travels to popular seaside resorts in New England. Among his favorite subjects were Maine’s Mount Desert Island and the shore areas around Narragansett, Rhode Island, and Nahant, Massachusetts. These landscapes and coastal scenes were generally well received, with critics praising in particular his geological accuracy in depicting the distinctive rock formations of the New England coast. In 1860 Haseltine was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design; he was made a full Academician the following year.
Personal tragedy struck in 1864 when Haseltine’s wife died in childbirth. In February 1866 the artist remarried and in May he and his family departed for Europe. He considered settling in Paris, but by 1867 he had joined the large international art colony in Rome, which would remain his base for much of the next thirty years. Haseltine’s paintings of European views, especially his landscapes and coastal views of Italian scenery, proved extremely popular with wealthy American tourists who were travelling abroad in ever-increasing numbers in the years after the Civil War. In the fall of 1874 Haseltine located his studio in a grand setting at the Palazzo Altieri, which he opened to visitors and potential patrons on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. This was a common practice among artists working in Rome, which had only a few contemporary art galleries and scant opportunities for public exhibition.
From his home in Rome, Haseltine often travelled to other areas of Italy and Europe, including Venice, Capri, Sicily, Paris, Cannes, Belgium, Holland, and the Netherlands. During the 1880s and 1890s, he and his family often spent summers in Bavaria and the Tyrol. Sketches made during these trips frequently served as the basis for later paintings and watercolors, with his scenes of Capri and Sicily proving very popular with tourists. Haseltine also made periodic trips back to the United States, especially during the 1890s. In the summer of 1899 he and his son, Herbert, made a trip west, visiting Utah, Colorado, California, Washington, Oregon, Alaska, Banff, and Yellowstone Park. This was his last trip to the states; a few months after his return to Europe in the fall, he contracted pneumonia and died in Rome on February 3, 1900. [This is an edited version of the artist’s biography published, or to be published, in the NGA Systematic Catalogue]
Natural Arch at Capri – 1871 – Gallery 67
Marina Piccola – 1858 – Not On View
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