During a career that spanned almost seventy years, Heade, an ardent naturalist and traveler, painted a great variety of subjects: portraits, luminous salt-marsh scenes, seascapes (often with thunder storms), tropical landscapes, hummingbird and orchid pictures, and floral still lifes. Heade had been fascinated by hummingbirds since his childhood, and in 1863–64 he spent six months in Brazil painting hummingbirds in their natural habitat; he intended to use the pictures as illustrations in a book to be called “The Gems of Brazil.” Although the book was never published, the artist did complete some forty-five small paintings of hummingbirds. After two trips to Central America in 1866 and 1870, Heade began a distinctive group of works combining hummingbirds and tropical flowers.
