Feathered Gems: Martin Johnson Heade’s Hummingbirds and the Nineteenth Century Feather Industry

This paper reinterprets Martin Johnson Heade’s paintings of hummingbirds in the context of the nineteenth century feather and international bird trade. Considering himself a “monomaniac on hummingbirds,” Heade first came to the subject after a trip to Brazil in 1863, when he embarked on a project titled The Gems of Brazil, which was meant to include detailed depictions of the birds in tropical landscapes in the format of chromolithographs. While that project was never completed, Heade did return to South America in 1866 and 1870 and painted several small, detailed canvases of hummingbirds often accompanied by native flora. Although, Heade intended to paint hummingbirds in the wild in Brazil, he mostly encountered specimens acquired from popular markets and shops in Rio de Janeiro. In this paper, I argue that Heade underwrote the international feather industry in two ways; by helping popularize conceptions of hummingbirds as decorative embodiments of color and by engaging with a set of marketing practices used in the display of both avian specimens and feather fashion accessories. Heade’s artwork engages the aesthetic sensibilities and display patterns of the feather market which justified the extraction of feathers and hunting of birds to the point of extinction. His paintings, which display a co-mingling of brightly colored species, seem to be indicative of the reaches of imperialism and capitalism where commodity chains brought foreign birds—as living animals and disembodied creatures—to the U.S. to be sold.