Flora covers every inch of land in American artist Martin Johnson Heade’s “Brazilian Forest” painting, creating a dense habitat for all manner of unseen fauna. In the center, a tree fern’s giant fronds fan out every which way, appearing like a broken umbrella that Heade used to draw our attention to the gushing waterfall below and the vast, misty, mountainous forest beyond. Lichen- and creeper-covered trees in the middle ground climb skyward beyond the picture plane. Here, nature reigns supreme, and Heade put this into perspective by adding a hunter in a red waistcoat and wide-brimmed hat who wades waist-deep through vegetation. His hunting dog follows along, ever alert to the choir of jungle animals.
Heade (1819–1904) completed “Brazilian Forest” in his London studio, fresh from his first trip to Brazil in 1864, during the American Civil War. Everything that he included in the scene he’d seen firsthand in its natural habitat. For instance, on the back of the painting, he inscribed “From Forest Studies in South America—Tree Fern.”
Although Heade was known for painting seascapes, salt marshes, and floral still life paintings, his trip to Brazil was the start of his lifelong penchant for painting the tropics and the hummingbird, his boyhood love. “A few years after my first appearance in this breathing world I was attacked by the all-absorbing hummingbird craze, and it has never left me since,” he said, according to art dealer and art historian Robert G. McIntyre.
The height of Heade’s work may just be his hummingbirds and tropical flowers that he loved to paint late in his 70-year career.
In Awe of Hummingbirds
Heade was known to carry a small tube of sugar water to feed the hummingbirds. In his “Notebook on Hummingbirds,” he wrote: “For one who is in the least degree attuned to poetic feeling they [hummingbirds] have a singularly fascinating power, which the subtlest mind is unable to explain but which all who have studied them must acknowledge to have felt.”He first painted them in 1863 in Brazil. Then, after traveling to Nicaragua and Colombia in 1866 and Colombia, Panama, and Jamaica in 1870, he rendered orchids in his hummingbird paintings, especially the Cattleya labiata, a pink blossom discovered in Brazil in the early 19th century.
“Although the orchid was a prized plant among travelers, naturalists, and illustrators, it was little known in both the fine arts and the popular flower books,” art historian Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. noted in his book “The Life and Work of Martin Johnson Heade: A Critical Analysis and Catalogue Raisonné.”
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Heade built up a comprehensive library of field studies of both the birds that he loved and their natural habitat. Between 1880 and 1904, he shared this expertise, writing over 100 letters and articles on the hummingbird and related topics for Forest and Stream magazine.
According to Christie’s, Heade developed a specific style for his hummingbird and orchid paintings: “He usually emphasized foreground objects, contrasting them with a hazy vista in the background—and he contrasted the soft delicateness of the orchids with the pungent, bold hues of the birds.”
In one of his early orchid and hummingbird works, “Cattleya Orchid and Three Hummingbirds,” the orchid takes up half the picture plane as three hummingbirds surround a nest. Two tiny Brazilian amethyst woodstar (Calliphlox amethystina) hummingbirds share the scene with a red-tailed comet (Sappho sparganurus) hummingbird. Lichen and mosses cover dead branches, and a blue-gray mist covers the vast, yet veiled, jungle backdrop. For Heade, including so many hummingbirds was unusual; the hummingbird, unless mating, is a rather solitary soul, and the artist echoed nature in his works.
“Heade’s later work included fewer hummingbirds—one or two, with a single pink Cattleya labiata blossom amid the tropical mountains,” Mr. Stebbins Jr. noted in his book. We can see this in the artist’s 1902 painting “Orchid and Hummingbird Near a Mountain Waterfall,” which he created at 83 years old, just two years before he died. Here, Heade painted an overcast sky similar to his early work “Cattleya Orchid and Three Hummingbirds,” yet the later painting appears more refined. The ruby-throated hummingbird’s color pops against the fresh Cattleya labiata orchid bloom, a shimmering waterfall peeks through the dense vegetation, and pale pink flashes of flowers echo throughout the valley.
Painting With Passion
Another outstanding work is Heade’s “Hummingbird and Passionflowers,” which scholars believe he painted over some 10 years.Shaped like the sun, the brilliant scarlet passionflowers in his painting stand out against the overcast sky. Perhaps he rendered the dramatic sky to accentuate the blooms’ Christian message. Missionaries named the passionflower as such because they believed it symbolized the Passion of Christ: The corona filaments appear like the crown of thorns, the three stigmas appear like nails, and the 10 petals represent the number of apostles present at Christ’s crucifixion. The passionflower vines in the painting take on an almost snake-like appearance, the snake of course being symbolic of the fall of man, and the passionflower a sign of the sacrifice Christ made to save us.
Heade rendered the highest bloom hanging down like stage lighting, as if to shine a light on the star of the painting: the jewel-like emerald feathers of the black-eared fairy hummingbird (Heliothryx auritus auritus) with its white breast.
The last stanzas in Robert Frost’s poem “A Prayer of Spring” almost express Heade’s deep appreciation of the land and the hummingbird.
And make us happy in the darting bird That suddenly above the bees is heard, The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill, And off a blossom in mid air stands still.
For this is love and nothing else is love, The which it is reserved for God above To sanctify to what far ends He will, But which it only needs that we fulfill.
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