Today, looking at Martin Johnson Heade’s tranquil marsh scenes, dramatic coastal views, lush hummingbird and tropical flower images, and glowing magnolia portraits, it is hard to grasp why this gifted, versatile and prolific artist was overlooked for so many years. During a long and peripatetic career, Heade (1819–1904) constantly reinvented himself, producing perhaps the most varied body of work of any 19th-century American painter. His depictions of Latin American birds, flora and landscapes are among the most unusual and increasingly admired masterpieces in our art history.

Clearly a superb technician who painted offbeat subjects in unconventional ways, Heade was considered a minor artist in his lifetime and was all but forgotten after his death. To a large degree, Heade was his own worst enemy in terms of reputation and sales during his lifetime. A cantankerous individualist, he argued and fought with wealthy people who might have become patrons. A modernist thinker ahead of his time, he preceded Claude Monet in creating series of the same scenes—and never repeated himself. These factors helped set Heade apart from more successful colleagues, and although he exhibited widely, his works sold for small sums, earning him a modest living.

A Pennsylvania farm boy, Heade grew up in Bucks County, where he received early artistic training under Quaker minister Edward Hicks of “Peaceable Kingdom” fame. Arriving in New York in his early twenties, Heade was befriended by Frederic E. Church and other stalwarts of the Hudson River School and soon began to create rather conventional landscapes, still lifes and portraits.

Undoubtedly stimulated by admiration for John James Audubon’s celebrated bird portraits and inspired by his friend Church’s enormous success with ambitious landscapes of South America, notably “The Heart of the Andes,” 1859, Heade made three pilgrimages to the region in the 1860s. He first traveled to Brazil in 1863 to paint hummingbirds, tiny colorful species for which he retained a lifelong affection.

Prodded by Emperor Dom Pedro II, whom he met, the artist-naturalist also became fascinated with the country’s dramatic scenery and tropical vegetation. His topographically accurate, Church-like “Sunset Harbor at Rio,” 1864, features awesome mountains surrounding the large, glistening body of water. “Brazilian Forest,” 1864, evoking the nation’s dank, dense, tree-tangled rain forest, includes a tiny crouching hunter and dog, reflecting Heade’s avid interest in hunting.

Highlighting Heade’s six-month Brazilian stay were his studies and sketches of a variety of jewel-like hummingbirds in their natural settings, prepared with an eye for publishing a book of chromolithographs to be called The Gems of Brazil. It was to be similar to Audubon’s monumental Birds of America.

However, when Heade sought to carry out his project in London, where Audubon’s masterpiece was produced, he was unable to line up the 200 subscribers necessary to print the expensive book and was apparently dissatisfied with the quality of the proposed chromolithographs.