Marsh Scene at Sunset

Provenance

Private collection, Mount Kisco, New York

Private collection, from above

Private collection, New York

Irene d’Olivio, Hopewell Junction, New York

Coe Kerr Gallery, New York.

Private collection

William Vareika Fine Arts, Newport, Rhode Island

Private collection, acquired from the above, 1989

Sale, Christie’s, New York, January 23, 2026, lot 432

Literature

T.E. Stebbins, Jr. The Life and Work of Martin Johnson Heade: A Critical Analysis and Catalogue Raisonné (Yale University Press, 2000), 240, no. 157, illustrated.

Patricia Havlice, World Painting Index, 3rd Supplement, 1990-1999 (The Scarecrow Press, 2003), 519, 522.

This painting is listed in the Inventory of American Paintings at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C.

Related Works

Newburyport Meadows, 1876-81, oil on canvas, 10½ x 22 inches, signed lower right: M J Heade; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York

Sunlight and Shadow: The Newbury Marshes, oil on canvas, 12 x 26½ inches, signed lower right: M J Heade; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C

Marshfield Meadows, Massachusetts, 1866-1876, oil on canvas, 17⅛ x 36¼ inches, signed lower left: M J Heade; on verso: Marshfield Mead[ows]; Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

Note

While many of his contemporaries focused on dramatic mountain and coastal scenery, Martin Johnson Heade instead explored the presence of the sublime that he observed in the pristine, open expanses of nature’s marshlands. By the end of his career, he had completed over 100 marsh subjects, a body of work that accounts for almost one-fifth of his oeuvre. Marsh Scene at Sunset presents a luminist view of the subject, highlighting Heade’s focus on the largely untouched coastal wetlands of mid-19th-century America. Heade scholar, Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr. contends that the artist “found a scene that was to enchant him for the rest of his life: a beautiful, changing marsh cut by winding rivers, in some seasons covered with huge haystacks which receded into the distance as far as the eye could see. To the painter the sight must have seemed to be the ultimate drama, a perfect juxtaposition of the pictorial and the moral.”[1]

[1] T.E. Stebbins, Jr., The Life and Works of Martin Johnson Heade (Yale University Press, 1975), 47.