Volume 42, Number 1 · January 12, 1995
Heade Storms
By John Updike
Ominous Hush: The Thunderstorm Paintings of Martin Johnson Heade
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 4, 1994–January 8, 1995
Ominous Hush: The Thunderstorm Paintings of Martin Johnson Heade
catalog of the exhibition by Sarah Cash, technical notes by Claire M. Barry
Amon Carter Museum, 88 pp., $25.00 (paper)
One good thing about nineteenth-century American painting is that there is a lot of it. The teeming schools of industrious, capable artists who catered to the romantic tastes of the burgeoning bourgeoisie held a number of odd fish that appeal, with the right critical sauces and scrupulous filleting, to the stringent tastes of this later century. One such is Martin Johnson Heade, a not unknown but never highly successful colleague and friend of Frederic Edwin Church. Heade, who changed his last name from Heed, was born in 1819 along the Delaware, in Lumberville, Pennsylvania, and led a wandering life, with addresses in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Rome, Paris, St. Louis, Chicago, Madison, Trenton, Providence, Boston, Rio, London, Nicaragua, Colombia, Jamaica, British Columbia, and California.
Review, 2552 words
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