Tropical Sunset: Florida Marsh

Martin Johnson Heade's 'Tropical Sunset: Florida Marsh' (1887) is a late work from his Florida period — Heade had settled in St. Augustine, Florida by the 1880s and found in the state's tropical marshes and estuaries a subject world quite different from his earlier New England salt marshes and South American tropical landscapes. The Florida marsh at sunset combined his lifelong interest in the drama of light over wetland with the specific quality of the subtropical atmosphere — the humidity, the tropical vegetation, and the dramatic Florida sunsets creating a distinctive atmospheric subject.

Heade renders the Florida marsh sunset with the luminous atmospheric sensitivity that characterized his mature wetland painting — the horizontal expanse of the marsh under the dramatic sunset sky, the still water reflecting the brilliant colors of the western horizon, and the silhouetted tropical vegetation creating the formal structure. His handling of the sunset light — its specific spectral quality and its transformation of the marsh's colors — demonstrates his mastery of the luminous effects that were his primary formal interest.