i / The Salt Marsh
Fascinated by the coastal ecosystems of the northeast, Martin Johnson Heade begins to paint panoramic scenes of salt marshes in 1859.8 The format of his salt marsh works, like Sudden Showers, Newbury Marshes, are unconventionally elongated, indicating the breadth of the landscape that each end of the canvas grasps outwards to reach.
Martin Johnson Heade, Sudden Showers, Newbury Marshes, Oil on canvas, 1865-1875, Yale University Art Gallery.
Even so, we only witness a part of the expanse. Water snakes through the marsh and into the viewer's ground, cleaving the containment of the landscape as sodden soils and grasses spill at our feet. The perspective from which Heade paints Sudden Showers, Newbury Marshes orients the viewer within the salt marsh, from which we turn every direction and are met with more amphibious expanse. Heade’s salt marsh paintings differ from conventional nationalist landscapes at the time that focus on vertical grandeur and vectored lines to make one wonder “what’s over the next ridge.” 9 Instead, the ecosystem absolves directionality and the saturated ground creates a sense of further stuckness.
The physical intraversability of the salt marsh, despite its flatness and wideness, is the antithesis of expansion and therefore the frontier experience; marshlands, instead, seem to provoke the opposite sense: repulsion.10 Heade disarms this preconception of the marsh as a wasteland and counters the pervasive itch for human expansion by turning the experience on its head; he renders extension and seepage in this pastoral idyll. Despite their unpopularity among audiences, Heade believes the salt marsh vista to be an inexhaustible source of study, which account for roughly a fifth of his works. 11 He becomes attuned to the topicality of the marshland, its constant ecological flux that reshapes the landscape in the next moment.
Four paintings of the Newburyport Marshes (1866-1876): Summer Showers (143), Approaching Storm (144), Passing Storm (145), Sudden Shower (146). Referenced from Theodore E. Stebbins, Martin Johnson Heade, Janet L. Comey, and Karen E. Quinn, The Life and Work of Martin Johnson Heade: A Critical Analysis and Catalogue Raisonné (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 237.
Heade depicts the same few locations, like the Newbury Marshes, in varying atmospheric and tidal conditions. The salt marsh ecosystem is uniquely sensitive to planetary forces, notably gravitational and meteorological phenomena. The intertidal zone that the salt marsh inhabits depends on cyclical tides generated by the gravitational pull of the moon and sun. 12 The orientation of both celestial bodies in relation to the Earth also influences the intensity of the tides and dramatically shifts the water levels of the landscape to alter the marsh's appearance.
Carol Butler, Judith Weis, Carol A. Butler. Salt Marshes: A Natural and Unnatural History (Rutgers University Press, 2009), 5.
The landscape is also affected by the atmospheric conditions present; rain and winds affect the proportions of brackish and freshwater that in turn affect the species composition of the salt marsh.13 Heade reflects on the ability of the marsh to harness these planetary forces, through which the landscape is constantly challenged and transforming.
Heade also studies the presence of human activity through his depictions of haystacks.
Martin Johnson Heade, Sketchbook (Colombia, Sidney, FL, MA): Haystack, with canvas held by weights; verso: Two-master, Graphite on paper, After 1865, Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Close-up of Sudden Showers, Newbury Marshes.
In Sudden Showers, Newbury Marshes, haystacks scatter the landscape and two figures rake hay in the background. Wild ducks bathe in the water and cows graze on the marsh grasses. Rather than alter the landscape, human activity exists in harmony with the salt marsh. Heade emphasizes the stoicism of the landscape, the wildlife and marshlands largely unaffected by the labor of local farmers. He preserves an equilibrium of nature and humans through his representation of the salt marsh by giving it the agency to both exist with and repel human forces.
| Items from Yale University Collections |
