MARSDEN HARTLEY (1877-1943)
Speckled Mountain (880 m - 2,887 ft)
United States of America (Maine)
In The Dark Mountain n°2, 1909, oil on commercially prepared paperboard, 50.8 x 61 cm,
The MET Museum
About the painting
Hartley’s dark, cloud-filled landscape pays direct homage to painter Albert Pinkham Ryder.
After seeing Ryder’s work in New York in 1909, Hartley, a native of Maine, executed a series of bleak, emotionally fraught, even tortured landscapes of his home state. This painting depicts the region of Stoneham Valley, near North Lovell, Maine, although Hartley painted it in New York from memory.
(From the Notice of the MET Museum)
The mountain
Speckled Mountain (880 m - 2,887 ft) which seems to be the mountain depicted by Marsden Hardley in the picture above is a mountain located in western Maine. It can be ascended by the Bickford Brook, Spruce Hill, Cold Brook, Red Rock and Blueberry Ridge trails, and is a popular day hike. It is a part of the Caribou-Speckled Mountain Wilderness within the White Mountain National Forest. It is located near the AMC Cold River Camp.
The painter
Marsden Hartley was an American Modernist painter, poet, and essayist.
Hartley began his art training at the Cleveland Institute of Art after his family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1892. He won a scholarship to the Cleveland School of Art.
In 1898, at age 22, he moved to New York City to study painting at the New York School of Art under William Merritt Chase, and then attended the National Academy of Design. Hartley was a great admirer of Albert Pinkham Ryder and visited his studio in Greenwich Village as often as possible. His friendship with Ryder, in addition to the writings of Walt Whitman and American transcendentalists Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, inspired Hartley to view art as a spiritual quest.
Hartley first traveled to Europe in April 1912, and he became acquainted with Gertrude Stein's circle of Avant-garde writers and artists in Paris. Stein, along with Hart Crane and Sherwood Anderson, encouraged Hartley to write as well as paint.
In 1913, Hartley moved to Berlin, where he continued to paint and befriended the painters Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. He also collected Bavarian folk art. His work during this period was a combination of abstraction and German Expressionism, fueled by his personal brand of mysticism.
In Berlin, Hartley developed a close relationship with a Prussian lieutenant, Karl von Freyburg. References to Freyburg were a recurring motif in Hartley's work, most notably in Portrait of a German Officer (1914). Freyburg's subsequent death during the war hit Hartley hard, and he afterward idealized their relationship. Many scholars believe Hartley to have been gay, and have interpreted his work regarding Freyburg as embodying his homosexual feelings for him.
Hartley finally returned to the U.S. in early 1916. He lived in Europe again from 1921 to 1930, when he moved back to the U.S. for good. He painted throughout the country, in Massachusetts, New Mexico, California, and New York. He returned to Maine in 1937, after declaring that he wanted to become "the painter of Maine" and depict American life at a local level. This aligned Hartley with the Regionalism movement, a group of artists active from the early- to-mid 20th century that attempted to represent a distinctly "American art." He continued to paint in Maine, primarily scenes around Lovell and the Corea coast, until his death in Ellsworth in 1943. His ashes were scattered on the Androscoggin River. Most of his mountains paintings of Maine are nowadays in the MET collections.
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2019 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau