Orchid and Hummingbird Bookmark

Martin Johnson Heade (American, 1819–1904)
Orchid and Hummingbird (detail), c. 1885

The Hudson River School was the country’s first distinctly American art movement. Sharing a mystical vision of their brave new land’s limitless beauty, artists such as Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Cole, and Martin Johnson Heade painted landscapes of great drama—mountains, sunsets, storms, crashing surf—or of abundance and serenity.

Like many of his colleagues, Heade concerned himself with the effects of light as both a scientific and a spiritual phenomenon. In Orchid and Hummingbird, his investment of the landscape with spiritual force is clear.