Martin Johnson Heade's Tropical Twimmingbird Landscapes

A first impression of Martin Johnson Heade’s tropical hummingbird landscapes might typically relate them to a “lush tangle of exotic nature” (p. 48). When the viewer more closely observes such landscapes, however, several unusual features become distinct, particularly, the startling disconnectedness of large scale subjects of flowers and hummingbirds against a distant landscape, and the contrast of sharp foreground figures surrounded by a gradual vignette of receding middle ground. Art historian Maggie M. Cao believes that studying and deciphering the startling inconsistencies of Heade’s hummingbird landscapes helps to reveal meaning in paintings that are otherwise only thought of in association with scientific studies or still-life paintings …show more content…
However, Heade intentionally chose a different approach. Church teasingly reprimanded Heade for not capturing South American mountains from remote locations as he had done, but Heade was more concerned with the study of plants and animals than in showing off his ambition of reaching wild and dangerous locations (p. 52). Heade was most interested in hummingbirds and created landscapes precisely focusing on them in the central foreground. With this new distinction, Heade surrounded his hummingbirds with tropical landscape that more blatantly mimicked the style of Church, even challenging Church’s established convention. Cao describes Heade’s and Church’s relationship not only by their tropical excursions, but by their studio activities in New York. While Church was absent from his studio, Heade took residence there, managing Church’s business, but also creating and advertising his own work. Cao suggests here that Heade perhaps gradually began usurping Church’s practices not only in his choice of wilderness, but within his very own studio. Cao supports this claim by comparing Heade’s paintings to Church’s The Heart of the