NEW YORK, NY.- In last night’s auction of American Art from the Collection of A. Alfred Taubman, Martin Johnson Heade’s 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, Heade’s 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 a part of Flagler College).

By the 1950s, View from Fern-Tree Walk, Jamaica had entered a private collection in Beverly Hills, CA. In 1987, it was bought by the great Michigan collector – and friend of Mr. Taubman – Richard Manoogian. The painting was purchased privately from Mr. Manoogian in 2013 for the MMAM. The Great Florida Sunset stayed with the Flagler family until it was purchased by Alfred Taubman in 1988 at a Sotheby’s auction. Following last night’s record-setting purchase, the pendant paintings will once again be reunited in public after decades apart.

In addition to major works by Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, John Kenesett and Thomas Moran, the collection acquired one of only two known versions of the famous work Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze. One version remains in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, while the MMAM’s version hung at the White House for many decades before entering their collection.

The Heade represents the second work from Mr. Taubman’s collection to have been acquired in Sotheby’s sales series for a public institution: the top lot of the Modern & Contemporary Art sale on 5 November was a rare work by Richard Gerstl, Dame Mit Federhut, which was purchased by Ronald S. Lauder for Neue Galerie New York.

The Minnesota Marine Art Museum (MMAM) is a 501c3 nonprofit art museum and education center that opened on July 27, 2006, attracting both regional and national attention. The impetus for building the Museum was to make the Winona area a nationally recognized center for arts and culture and to build on the robust educational systems of the greater region.

The initial collections consisted of a substantial collection of traditional marine paintings and an equally large collection of folk art by popular regional artists Leo and Marilyn Smith. After expanding the quality and diversity of its collections year after year, adding an ambitious roster of educational programs and temporary exhibitions, and expanding its facility in 2009 and again in 2013, the MMAM of today is a dynamic and surprising experience for tens of thousands of visitors.