High Tide on the Marshes

A wide inlet of salt marsh shines under a luminous sky, the flooding tide filling the channels between low haystacks and distant trees. Martin Johnson Heade, the great specialist of the American salt-meadow view, painted this long, horizontal canvas in 1872, when his studies of the marshes along the eastern coast were at their most accomplished. The broad, tranquil expanse, the clear still light and the delicate transparencies of water and cloud are the essence of the mid-century style called Luminism, of which Heade became the most devoted master.