Marsden Hartley

A member of the Stieglitz group, Marsden Hartley was an influential American painter known for his unique blend of American Modernism and European Expressionism. From a tender age, Hartley developed a deep connection to the landscapes and natural beauty of his home state of Maine, which would later become a significant influence in his work.

Born in Lewiston, Maine in 1877, Hartley was the ninth child of Thomas Hartley and Eliza Jane Horbury and originally given the first name Edmund. Growing up a lonely child, he left school at 15 to work and soon moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where he began painting lessons in 1896. Demonstrating innate talent, Hartley was awarded a scholarship to the Cleveland School of Art and shortly thereafter earned a stipend to live and study in New York. He spent a year at William Merritt Chase’s New York School of Art and four years at the National Academy of Design. In 1906 he adopted his stepmother’s maiden name as a middle name and in 1908 he dropped his first name, declaring himself as the artist Marsden Hartley.

Hartley's finest early works present the Maine landscape in a style that demonstrates the technical influence of Italian painter Giovanni Segantini and the spiritual inspiration of American transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. 

The early Maine landscapes captured the attention of the pioneer photographer and Modernist dealer Alfred Stieglitz, establishing one of the most formative relationships of Hartley’s career. At his radical gallery, 291, Stieglitz gave Hartley his first solo exhibition in 1909. Stieglitz also introduced Hartley to a group of other American Modernists, including Max Weber and Alfred Maurer, as well as the work of European avant-garde artists, such as Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Hartley was immediately drawn to the Europeans’ works, compelling him to travel abroad to further his artistic development. With Stieglitz’s support, he left for Paris in 1912.

Following in the footsteps of other members of the Stieglitz Circle, and indeed a long tradition of American artists, he settled in Paris to immerse himself in the post-Impressionist, Fauvist and Cubist movements that were incubating in the capital of the modern art world. However, Hartley would find the inspiration behind his greatest European works in the up-and-coming German art world of Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. Hartley developed some of the most innovative, emotive paintings of early abstraction during this seminal trip to Europe from 1912 to 1915. These paintings included Abstraction (1912–13), which sold at Christie’s New York in 2019 for US$6,744,500, setting a world auction record for the artist.

After extensive travels as widespread as Berlin, Bermuda and Santa Fe, Hartley returned to his home state in 1937. Expressing this spiritual appreciation for the natural landscape through visceral technique, Hartley’s works from this period, such as Camden Hills from Baker’s Island (1938), are some of the most acclaimed paintings of his oeuvre.

Hartley died in 1943 back in his home state of Maine. Throughout his career, Hartley exhibited widely, both in the United States and Europe. His works belong in the collections of major museums, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.