Did you know that Heade’s hummingbird paintings are now considered “open domain” (expired copyright) and are therefore available at the following website for downloading?
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/heade_martin_johnson.html Click on The Athenaeum first.
Heade painted on little canvasses, but on your monitor, you feel as if you were right up above the South American canopy with the hummingbirds looking out over far away vistas of jungle and waterfall with dramatic skies. The painting, “Tropical Landscape with Ten Hummingbirds” was done by Heade on his last trip to South America in 1870 and may have 8 species of hummingbird. In it, beyond and below the vining red passionflower, are a lake and distant mountains set in a tropical jungle.
Don’t miss “Orchid and Two Hummingbirds” 1872 and “Two Fighting Hummingbirds with Two Orchids” 1875. And then, there’s “Blue Morpho Butterfly” 1864-5. He is also famous for the landscapes, “Brazilian Forest” 1864 and “Coast of Jamaica” 1874.
In North America, his “Appleblossoms and Hummingbird” 1871 is set in a blackened sky about to let loose a monster storm. The sun is just coming back out in “April Showers” 1868. And the season moves along in the apple orchard in “Asters in a Field” 1871.
His landscapes of marshes and the sea around Rhode Island and Massachusetts, set in different kinds of weather from sunrise to sunset and everything in between, are haunting. I hope you will also check out, “The Great Florida Marsh” done in 1886.
He’s also known for his still life paintings - I have never seen anything like those vases. The glass nautilus vase on Artrenewal does wonderful things with light. Of course, I don’t have adjectives for the flowers.
When I clicked on The Athenaeum, I found the largest collection of images, each large enough to easily use as wallpaper (after downloading, right click on the thumbnail and then click on “set as background”).
The images show up even better if you make a file of images to use as a screen saver, which moves the paintings across the screen of your monitor. This works best with about 24 images to a file, so I made separate files titled: “Hummingbirds_NoFlowers”, “Hummingbirds_withOrchids”, and “Hummingbirds_withOtherFlowers”.
(On my XP Professional Microsoft, I go through the Control Panel to Display to the Screen Saver Tab. Next, click on “Settings” and then click on “Browse”. Once in “Browse”, click on the file you want to use as your screen saver and click OK. Back on the Screen Saver tab, adjust the “Wait” box to 1 minute (increase wait time after viewing so you can do other projects afterwards) - hit OK.
On the Screen Savers tab, you can set how fast the images will move across the screen, their size, and some special effects.
edited 4/26/05 to say "hummingbird" in first sentence - Senior non-Sentience Moment? LOL
This message was edited Apr 26, 2005 11:49 AM
Hummingbird Paintings of Martin Johnson Heade
Thanks, bluespiral. Martin Johnson Heade is probably one of my favorite artists. I grew up not too far from Boston, so I often visited the Museum of Fine Arts there which has a pretty good selection of Heade paintings. In fact if you go here... http://www.mfa.org/ , and search in the online collections (type Heade in the search box), you can see the information on the over 50 paintings of his they have in their collection. Over half to maybe 2/3 have images that you can click on and look at, some even in very close detail ("interactive zoom") is the feature. There is also information about when the paintings were painted, where, etc.
I especially would suggest "Approaching Storm: Beach near Newport" as well as some of his hummingbird and marsh paintings. When I clicked on them now, it says that most paintings are not currently on display, which is too bad. I know that "Approaching Storm..." is considered a master work, so I hope they put it back on display before the next time that I visit Boston.
This message was edited Apr 24, 2005 4:20 AM
This message was edited Apr 24, 2005 4:25 AM
Night_Bloom, how wonderful to visit those paintings whenever you were in Boston. I do like that feature on mfa's website giving some background to each of the paintings. I probably will never get over having so many virtual museums, galleries, libraries, sheet music, education in math and sciences, etc. - all free on the web. It's the web that picks up where public libraries leave off, with their policy of getting rid of any books that are not frequently checked out, and they make available so much more than any library I ever visited does, anyway.
Does anyone want me to post the links I have found relative to my remarks above?
Night_Bloom, I do tend to ramble. Back to Heade -
The Athenaeum has 195 of his paintings, including all the ones at the Boston museum, which you can copy to your harddrive (am hoping to back my copies up on a disk). The Athenaeum encourages everyone to share their offerings, in all branches of the humanities - not just art - as long as you credit them as your source.
But to see Heade's paintings - whenever I want - glide across the entire 'puter monitor, illuminated from behind, which makes light look as if it really is glowing against darker contrasts on the canvas, is quite an experience, too. This really captures the drama of the skies and ocean in 'Approaching Storm...' as well as all the other phases of weather and light in his other paintings.
Well, thank you for responding Night_Bloom. Do you grow night flowering plants? I'm always looking for those, especially fragrant, pale ones. There seems to be a wide appreciation of moonflowers on DG, and it's always fun when a newbie discovers them for the first time on DG.
The dumb one could not find Athenaeum. :-(
Imway, am noodling over this "dumb one" monikor. If I could be as succinct and germaine with my remarks as you are, I might get something done with my life. Let alone have fewer foot-in-the-chops moments - LOL.
Here's The Athenaeum: http://www.the-athenaeum.org/art/by_artist.php?id=447 (Artrenewal is the 1st one under Pictures from Image Archives.)
There's a great article about Heade and his work on this webpage, too: http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/1aa/1aa505.htm
According to the botanic artist, Margaret Mee, who also painted in the Brazilian tropical forest about 100 years after Heade, only 5% of the tropical forest where she and Heade painted their hummingbirds and flowers survives. She was killed in a car accident shortly after making that remark in an interview around her 88th birthday. Her book is very much worth hunting down - probably second hand.
I am on my way to those links. Thanks! Btw, foot in the mouth disease = imway2dumb. Kind of like "stupid is as stupid does." ;-)
Wanna have a contest?
Thats a contest I would have a real chance at winning! I gotta control this DG addiction and go to those links!
bluespiral: no I don't really grow night blooming flowers - except I do have a whole bunch of confederate jasmine - why I don't know because I treat it badly. It's not as "night-blooming" as night-blooming jasmine, but it does continue to put out scent at night. Moon flowers sound fun though.
Actually I chose Night_Bloom, because I'm the night bloomer - hee - as you might be able to tell from the time of my usual posts. I also post under the name Night_Nymph - but that's for my other online hobby (I'm a Buffy fan).
Hmmmm, am trying to imagine a Buffy Garden - Those black-toned, scarlet leaves of Virginia creeper up a black wrought-iron trellis with the bat flower (tacca something? it has whiskers) edged with one of the two species of fungus in Maryland that glow in the dark for autumn?
Now, what would the other seasons look like? We need this garden to be expansive enough for a sense of enclosure/claustrophia. Or not?
Hee, bluespiral. My poor regular gardens are claustrophic enough - especially my butterfly garden which often looks like a jungle with all the "weed" cover and host plants. Glow in the dark fungus would, however, be quite cool. I have a soft spot for fungi - which often also takes up residence in my butterfly garden, especially around the large oak stump.
However in your theme, bleeding hearts seem to come to mind, though my returning one is only the white one so far. I don't have the one with the red tips planted in my garden yet. Those and maybe the moon flowers would be lovely for spring along with, of course, angel statuary reminiscent of the graveyard.
Karen, I enjoyed the paintings very much.
I just learned that moonflowers also attract the shinx moth! Now it is on my must have list.
John
Night_Bloom, Nothing spookier than the combination of white bleeding hearts coming up through black ophiogon (ophiogon planiscapus 'Nigrescens'). (I just poke the seeds of ophiopogon that appear in late fall in the ground around their parents, and they come up in late spring - 90% have those black leaves). Besides color and leaf contrast, the "mood" of these two really shows each other off.
For late summer, make room in your black, creepy-crawly ophiopogon for chalices of white colchicum (Plant at least 2' away from the bleeding heart - colchicum leaves come out and trounce spring neighbors. Their flowers appear without leaves in late summer). Since your garden is full, you probably already have a shrub or vine (that jasmine sounds ideal) to back this combination up against, perhaps letting it spill out to the path.
I must really be addicted to DG - perfect, sunny spring day out there right there. Will check back here later.
Imway, did you see Horseshoe's contribution to the moonflower shmoozing that seems always to have gone on at DG? I'll never stop laughing over that one. When I come back, I'll bring the link if you don't find it first.
DH is waving a posy of apple blossoms under my nose - gotta go.
And what's a night garden without the night perfume of Brugmansia trumpets (I don't mean datura, here - some of my friends compare it to 2 week old sweaty socks)? Perhaps collectively, we can persuade someone on that forum to part with a cutting or two for something we could trade...?
Give me the link, I'm lazy.
Imway, I will always treasure this thread. It has everything - the magic of discovery of the moonflower by first time growers and first-time trellisers, much sage advice and meandering, a tad of moonflower science (speculative), the quest for the lost blue moonflower, ancient Native American trade routes, and a tale from Horseshoe. The quote on September 7 was from Mark Twain.
But, DH and I are still pretty messed up over putting our Fifi to sleep last week, so if anyone is nursing an adored sick or old feline member of the family, it might be best to skip this one:
http://davesgarden.com/forums/t/448913/
We have gone through that too, Karen. (((((hugs)))))