Artist: Martin Johnson Heade

Cover Art for Century of The Death of The Rose Book

About the Painting

cattleya-orchid-and-three-hummingbirds-1871

Cattleya Orchid and Three Hummingbirds (1871), Martin Johnson Heade (National Gallery of Art)

The painting by Martin John Heade of “Cattleya Orchid and Three Hummingbirds” (1871) was published as the cover design for Century of the Death of the Rose: Selected Poems of Jorge Carrera Andrade.

The printing process from a hi-resolution photograph of the original artwork in the gallery of the National Gallery of Art included a color printing process using four color separations provided by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC., to faithfully reproduce the high quality of the original painting. The rights for reproduction were purchased to included special permission for publication as the book cover for Century of The Death of The Rose: The Selected Poems of Jorge Carrera Andrade, 1926–1976, published by NewSouth Books of Montgomery, Alabama. Art.

 

About the Artist

Heade

Martin Johnson Heade, a member of the Hudson River School of painting, was born in 1819 and reared in Lumberville, a small rural community near Doylestown, in Buck’s County, Pennsylvania. Primarily a self-taught artist with no formal training, he took a study trip in 1840 to Europe where he spent two years in Rome. From that trip, Heade was a constant traveler, never stopping anywhere long enough to put down roots. By turn he lived in New York, Philadelphia, Rome again, Saint Louis, Chicago, Trenton, New Jersey, Providence, Rhode Island, Boston, St. Augustine, Florida, and various cities and rural areas of Brazil.

Influenced by landscape painters, particularly Frederic Edwin Church, the period after 1863 marks the maturing of his personal style of landscape painting. His interest  was in the broad panoramas of landscapes, subtle atmospheric effects of the air, sky, and weather. His detailed renderings of the natural world in their preciseness resulted in stunning renderings of landscapes of the Hudson Valley. and his attempts to capture the fleeting beauty of nature. Beginning in 1863, Heade took several trips to Brazil to begin painting a complete series of South American hummingbirds and orchids. His later years were devoted to floral still lifes, recurring scenes from the South America landscapes of his travels, and the coastal landscapes of New England, for which he is most often remembered today.
Although Heade exhibited widely—at the National Academy of Design, the Pennsyl- vania Academy of the Fine Arts, the American Art-Union, the Boston Athenaeum, and Royal Academy in London—he did not achieve noticeable recognition during his lifetime. His paintings were rediscovered during a 1940s revival of interest in the Hudson River School of painting and are today considered to be the work of a premier American artist.