With entrepreneurial hopes of creating a book of prints similar to John James Audubon’s popular Birds of America, Martin Johnson Heade made three trips to South America in the 1860s searching for exotic flora and fauna to paint. He became captivated by hummingbirds and even kept them as pets. This scene was probably inspired by a trip to Jamaica in 1870, when the artist began to add orchids to his paintings. The sexual connotations of orchids and hummingbirds may have accounted in part for their contemporary popularity.
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