Marsh River with a Large Haystack

Martin Johnson Heade painted Marsh River with a Large Haystack in the late 1870s. This was a tremendously productive period for the artist, and during this time he painted some of his finest landscapes of marshes. Marsh River with a Large Haystack exemplifies Heade's work in this genre--the composition is open and horizontal, providing a brilliant sense of light and space. Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr. has written, "Heade somehow felt at home in the marsh--a buggy, muddy, unimposing place, which only today is being recognized by conservationists for its great ecological values. Clement and Hutton noted is in 1880 that Heade; has been very successful is in his views of the Hoboken and Newburyport meadows, for which the demand has been so great that he has probably painted more of them than any other class of subjects.' He sought out marshes all over the coastal United States; he painted them in Marshfield, Massachusetts, in New Jersey, in Florida, and probably in many other places. The marshes have an anonymity that he must have liked; in the marsh he was alone, with only an occasional cow or farmer in the distance. He had a subject that was suited to his mentality, which was essentially that of the still-life painter, and he painted virtually the same scene over and over, under varying conditions of time and weather, making small adjustments, always trying to paint the perfect picture." (Martin Johnson Heade, University of Maryland, 1969, n.p.)

This work will be included in Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr.'s forthcoming catalogue raisonn of the artist's work.