| Notes: |
The Smith College Museum which owns this work has a useful description of Heade's haystack series: 'Heade's banded compositions seem to laugh in the face of received aesthetic theory regarding the picturesque and the sublime. Among the only notable pictorial elements are the huge haystacks -- some in the nineteenth century rising to heights of twenty feet -- which kept the salt grasses elevated and dry as they awaited use as fodder and packing...Heade's compositional elements -- the clouds, the rutted ditches, the switchback canal and the succession of haystacks receding infinitely into the distance -- all induce a lateral rocking motionm a sweeping, panning vision that moves us naturally, not forcibly, through space.' The Smith College Museum of Art : European and American painting and sculpture, 1760-1960, New York, 2000, p. [?] |
