New Jersey Salt Marsh

Born in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Martin Johnson Heade turned to landscape painting shortly after moving to New York in 1859. There he absorbed the tenets of the Hudson River School, including the direct, highly detailed observation of nature and capturing ephemeral effects of light. Beginning in the early 1860s, Heade created a large number of paintings depicting the salt marshes of New Jersey and New England. While his contemporaries largely ignored these flat terrains, Heade, a hunter and fisherman, was drawn to the wetlands and painted them in a range of climatic moods.