ii / Last Frontier
Given their consideration as pseudo-lands, anti-lands, and waste-lands, marshlands became one of the last ecosystems to be both conquered and preserved. Land development in the 19th and 20th century resulted in significant degradation of wetland habitats .14 Heade observes the steady progression of anthropogenic infiltration of this ‘last frontier’ ecosystem of continental America.
Martin Johnson Heade, Lynn Meadows, Oil on canvas, 1863, Yale University Art Gallery.
In 1863, Heade paints Lynn Meadows, which shows men working in the mudflats of a receding tide. Behind them, a train passes along a railroad that follows the horizon in a unidimensional path. Rather than penetrating the landscape, it carefully traces the periphery of the mudflats.
J. M. W. Turner. Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway, Oil on canvas, 1844, The National Gallery, London.
J. M. W. Turner's Rain, Steam, Speed (1844) presents an early depiction of the railroad that conversely ruptures planar perspective. The locomotive accelerates toward the foreground, collision imminent.
While both works are indicators of industrialization, Heade’s Lynn Meadows preserves the agency of the landscape, unlike Turner’s dilating visual of disruption.
The coexistence of land and machine in Lynn Meadows is preserved as two distinct events, rather than as a symbiotic event. The chugging locomotive and the men digging clams seem to be negligent of one another, existing in separate worlds. 15 This subtle incongruity of the landscape reveals Heade’s foreshadowing of the mounting threat of anthropogenic change to the wetlands, a boundary on the verge of collapse.
Heade returns to panoramic scenes of salt marshes after moving to north Florida in 1883.16 His decision to move south is influenced by the familiarity of ecosystems, notably the wetlands. With reinvigorated interest, Heade paints the primordial swamps and marshes of the Florida coast and rivers. One of his first works of this landscape is On the San Sebastian River, Florida.
Martin Johnson Heade, On the San Sebastian River, Florida, 1883, Oil on canvas, Museum of Arts & Sciences, Daytona Beach. Gift of CiCi and Hyatt Brown.
While the scene likely represents the San Sebastian River at dawn or dusk, the lack of a visible light source confounds the temporality to induce a supernatural setting. On the San Sebastian River, Florida depicts a person in a kayak harvesting grasses in the foreground. They are tailed by pink and carbon black clouds encroaching along the noxious yellow sky. Smokestacks and power plants populate the horizon line; their machine smoke feeds into the sky and curdles into sinister bodies. Heade’s anxieties manifest in On the San Sebastian River, Florida and indicate his ecological reflexivity to the impending ecosystem destruction, which occurs due to increasing tourism and industrialization in Florida in the late 19th century.17
| Items from Yale University Collections |
