Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904) was born in Pennsylvania into a family of warehouse keepers. Already as a youth, he visited Europe to learn portrait painting. After returning to America, he lived as a wandering artist. In 1843, his friends Jasper Francis Cropsey and Thomas Cole of the Hudson River School artistic society brought him to landscape painting. For inspiration, he travelled to the tropics, where he painted hummingbirds and Magnolia on a Gold Velvet. During his life, Heade was not recognized as a Romantic artist. In the 1940s, his work finally started attracting the interest of scientists, historians and art collectors. In 2004, one of Head’s paintings was part of the US Postal Service.