Displaying items by tag: martin johnson heade

There was a silver lining to Wednesday’s otherwise disappointing Sotheby’s auction of American art from the Alfred A. Taubman collection: The sale led to a reunion of siblings.

“The Great Florida Sunset,” an 1887 landscape by Martin Johnson Heade, sold for $5.9 million — more than double the previous record for him, though less than the expected $7 million to $10 million.

Nineteen major paintings lent from the private collection of Thelma and Melvin Lenkin of Chevy Chase, Md., are on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum through Aug. 16. Mary Cassatt’s renowned “Reading ‘Le Figaro’” is joined by major oil paintings by George Bellows, Martin Johnson Heade, John Singer Sargent, John Sloan, William Glackens, John La Farge, Everett Shinn and others. These artworks have been installed on the second-floor galleries of the museum within the chronological flow of the museum’s permanent collection to create a narrative around the excitement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in America, a “coming-of-age” period in American art. Many of the works are on public view for the first time.

The final installment of the “American Encounters” exhibition series co-organized by the musée du Louvre, the High Museum of Art, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Terra Foundation for American Art, the exhibition “The Simple Pleasures of Still Life” explores the rise of still-life painting in 19th-century America. In the wake of the exhibitions on landscape, genre painting, and portraiture, this exhibition provides a new opportunity to foster dialogue on American painting.

Featuring 10 artworks from the collections of the four partner institutions, this final exhibition follows on from the previous ones to illustrate how American painters like Raphaelle Peale, Martin Johnson Heade, and William Michael Harnett adapted European models to their time and country, and thus contributed to the creation of a national voice.