Two Studies of Islands from The Thousand Islands Sketchbook

Inscriptions

Inscribed, center right: Thousand Islands; center left: 25 ft long; upper right, within island: very near; numbered, upper right (by Spanierman Gallery): 5 [encircled]

Label

Martin Johnson Heade sketched these islands along the Saint-Lawrence River during what began as a trip through New England. Unlike an earlier generation of artists, he was not attracted to the region’s rugged peaks but found himself drawn instead to unspectacular, low-lying terrain, such as he encountered along Lake Champlain and the Thousand Islands. He rendered these modest island vignettes from a low vantage point, using energetic strokes to define every rock and tree, while large areas of untouched paper read as calm water and cloudless skies. The composition’s strong horizontality, clarity, and sense of quietude echo Heade’s luminous shoreline paintings of the same period.

From the 2022 exhibition This Land: American Engagement with the Natural World, curated by Jami C. Powell, Curator of Indigenous Art; Barbara J. MacAdam, former Jonathan L. Cohen Curator of American Art; Thomas H. Price, former Curatorial Assistant; Morgan E. Freeman, former DAMLI Native American Art Fellow; and Michael Hartman, Jonathan Little Cohen Associate Curator of American Art

Course History

ANTH 7.05, Animals and Humans, Laura Ogden, Winter 2022

GEOG 31.01, Postcolonial Geographies, Erin Collins, Winter 2022

ANTH 50.05, Environmental Archaeology, Madeleine McLeester, Winter 2022

ANTH 50.05, Environmental Archaeology, Madeleine McLeester, Winter 2022

ARTH 5.01, Introduction to Contemporary Art, Mary Coffey and Chad Elias, Winter 2022

ANTH 3.01, Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, Chelsey Kivland, Summer 2022

ANTH 3.01, Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, Chelsey Kivland, Summer 2022

SPAN 65.15, Wonderstruck: Archives and the Production of Knowledge in an Unequal World, Silvia Spitta and Barbara Goebel, Summer 2022

Exhibition History

Marks of Distinction: Two Hundred Years of American Drawings and Watercolors from the Hood Museum of Art, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, March 29-May 29, 2005; Grand Rapids Art Museum, Grand Rapids, Michigan, June 24-September 11, 2005; National Academy Museum, New York City, New York, October 20-December 31, 2005.

This Land: American Engagement with the Natural World, Israel Sack Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth, Hanover, New Hampshire, January 5–July 22, 2022.

Publication History

Theodore Stebbins, The Life and Works of Martin Johnson Heade, New Haven and New London: Yale University Press, 1975, p. 290, no. 398.

Barbara J. MacAdam, Marks of Distinction: Two Hundred Years of American Drawings and Watercolors from the Hood Museum of Art, Manchester, Vermont: Hudson Hills Press, 2005, pp. 20, 88, 254-255, ill. p. 89, no. 18.

Provenance

The artist; by descent to Sam Heed (the artist's nephew), Lumberville, Pennsylvania; to Mrs. Elsie Heed Housley (his daughter), Lumberville, Pennsylvania, until 1969; to Ross Kepler, New Jersey, until 1993; Sotheby's, New York, New York, "American Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture," May 27, 1993, in lot 202, as the Housley Sketchbook; sold to Spanierman Gallery, LLC, New York, New York, 1993; sold to present collection, 1999.

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