In last nights auction of American Art from the Collection of A. Alfred Taubman, Martin Johnson Heades monumental masterpiece The Great Florida Sunset was acquired for the collection of the Minnesota Marine Art Museum (MMAM) in Winona, Minnesota. Opened in 2006, the museum holds one of the greatest collections of Hudson River School works in the United States, to which the present canvas will be an important addition. The acquisition will reunite The Great Florida Sunset on public view with its pendant painting, Heades View from Fern-Tree Walk, Jamaica, which was acquired for the MMAM in 2013. American industrialist Henry Morrison Flagler commissioned the two monumental canvases from Heade in 1887, to hang in his Hotel Ponce de León in St. Augustine, Florida. The two paintings are the largest ever executed by the artist in his prolific career, and hung together in the upper rotunda of the hotel (later
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