OIL PAINTING: Sailing by Moonlight, c.1860
Martin Johnson Heade Sailing by moonlight signed M.J. Heade, l.l. oil on canvas 14 1/4 by 22 1/4 in. (36.2 by 56.5cm.) Painted circa 1870-75. In 1858, Martin Johnson Heade moved to New York and took a studio in the recently completed Tenth Street Studio Building. It was there that Heade met Frederic Edwin Church, heir to Thomas Cole's landscape tradition and a dramatic influence on the stylistic development of maN0 of his contemporaries working in the Tenth Street studios, including Heade. By 1860, such artists as Sanford Robinson Gifford, Worthington Whittredge,
Albert Bierstadt and John F. Kensett had studios in the building and were exploring individual approaches to depicting the American landscape. As Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr. notes, "Both Heade and Kensett were concerned with the interplay of sea and sky and the nuances of light, but their wo