Summer Showers Through the Eyes of an American Artist
This summer has been a wet one in southern Ontario.
Artist Martin Johnson Heade was so fascinated by water and landscape that he painted more than 100 pictures like this one called Summer Showers during the late 1850’s.
He gravitated to the lowland coastal salt marshes of the American Northeast, making his studies of the sites in the summer and early fall, when the harvesting of grass and hay took place, capturing the changing effects of light and weather in a way that other more prominent Hudson River School painters had never done before.
The band of foreground clouds is effectively realistic, framing the distant view and punning on the margin of shadow customarily cast by the picture frames of the period.
This particular painting is found at the Brooklyn Museum.
Heade’s work can be further studied on www.edu.Global, where millions of online resources await your discovery. Search faster, research easier, free trials available now.