After the Rain in the Salt Marshes

Artist Martin Johnson Heade (American, 1819 - 1904)

Dateca. 1874

MediumOil on canvas

DimensionsUnframed: 13 1/8 x 26 7/16 inches (33.34 x 67.15 cm)
Framed: 20 1/2 x 33 3/4 x 4 inches (52.07 x 85.73 x 10.16 cm)

Credit LineGift of the Enid and Crosby Kemper Foundation

Object numberF78-10

SignedSigned lower right (in black paint): M. J. Heade

On View

On view

Gallery Location

Collections

American Art

Terms

DescriptionFlat field with several haystacks, stream winding from left foreground to central background. Cows in patch of sunlight, far right; edge of wooded area, far left.Exhibition History

Exhibition History

American Luminism, Coe Kerr Gallery, New York, October 25–November 25, 1978, no. 16 (as Marsh Scene).

Gallery Label

Martin Johnson Heade was best known in his lifetime, as today, for his marsh paintings, a subject he first undertook in the 1860s. Although Heade painted marshes in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey and Florida, he captured the overall character of marsh life, rather than recalling specific locales. After the Rain in the Salt Marshes incorporates hallmarks of Heade's marsh compositions: a strongly horizontal view of the landscape, cut by a winding ribbon of water and dotted with haystacks receding into the distance. Heade also often added strong directional light effects to create dynamic patterns of shadows that animate the otherwise calm scene.

Provenance

(Coe Kerr Gallery, New York);

to NAMA, 1978.

Published References

American Luminism, exh. cat. (New York: Coe-Kerr Gallery, 1978), unpaginated (as Marsh Scene).

“Kemper Gifts to the Nelson,” Kansas City Times, December 6, 1977, 34.

Ralph T. Coe, “Valuable Gifts,” letter to the editor, Kansas City Star, May 7, 1980, 18A.

Ross E. Taggart, “American Paintings in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri,” Antiques 122 (November 1982), 1032, 1034, 1038.

Donald Hoffmann, “Kemper Family Donates $1.5 Million Portrait,” Kansas City Star, October 12, 1986, 12A.

Henry Adams, Handbook of American Paintings in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City, Mo.: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1991), 91 (as After the Rain in the Salt Marshes [Marsh Scene]).

Roger Ward and Patricia J. Fidler, eds. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: A Handbook of the Collections. 6^th ed. (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1993), 228, 236 (as Marsh Scene).

Michael Churchman and Scott Erbes, High Ideals and Aspirations: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art 1933–1993 (Kansas City, Mo.: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1993), 100 (as Marsh Scene).

Theodore E. Stebbins Jr., The Life and Work of Martin Johnson Heade: A Critical Analysis and Catalogue Raisonné (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 239, no. 153.

Margaret C. Conrads, ed. The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: American Paintings to 1945 (Kansas City, Mo.: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2007), 1: 307–09, 2: 129–29.

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