PLEIN AIR HERITAGE
Although he kept a studio in the same building in New York City as several artists of the Hudson River School and became good friends with Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900) — one of its most celebrated members — Martin Johnson Heade (1819–1904) operated on the fringes of the movement. His paintings exhibit the same influence of Romanticism, but while his building-mates turned to the wilds for inspiration for their majestic depictions of mountains, valleys, and waterfalls, Heade opted for decidedly more horizontal expanses of subdued scenery — primarily salt marshes and coastal settings, from Massachusetts to New Jersey. Even when he painted storms, a favorite subject, he preferred the somber buildup to the main event. Here, rather than the tempest itself, it was its prelude — the blackening sky and eerily…