Marsden Hartley 1878-1943

The artist
Adelaide S. Kuntz (acquired from the above), 1941
Bertha Schaefer, New York
Anne and Sidney Gerber, Seattle, Washington
Gift to the present owner from the above, 1957

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Carnegie Institute, The Seashore in Paintings of the 19th and 20th Centuries, October-December 1965

Patterson Sims writes, "Unlike most of his U.S. colleagues, Marsden Hartley made Berlin, not Paris, the aesthetic and geographical base of his trips abroad in the early years of the twentieth century.  Better than any other leading American modernist, Hartley used the emotive power of German art to record the American landscape.  Views of nature were Hartley's chief subject matter, as he passed through an unusual number of locales during his migratory existence.  For several summers in the 1930s the Massachusetts coast around the crowded summer art community of Gloucester was the inspiration of his work.  Undated by the artist, this particular Gloucester view was, according to the original owner, painted in 1934, though the Hartley scholar Elizabeth MacCausland placed it in 1936.  Hartley was working in Gloucester during the summer of 1934; the later date would make it a recollection of the area.  In the intervening year Hartley traveled to Bermuda; MacCausland reasoned that this painting was "a Bermuda subject against a Gloucester background."  Whether painted in 1934 or 1936, the special way the color was applied and scratched off its board surface, the density of its subject matter, and the work's spatial disjunctions--from the large sea shell to the thin band of sky at the top--give the eye much to consider.  The act of painting, more than what is painted, rules this work."