Marsden Hartley 1878-1943

Estate of Ari Fleischer
Robert Schoelkopf Gallery, New York, 1964
Acquired by the present owner from the above, 1964

Portland, Maine, Portland Museum of Art (on loan), 1974-1999
Waterville, Maine, Colby College Museum of Art (on loan)
Lewiston, Maine, Bates College (on loan)
New York, Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, Marsden Hartley and Walt Kuhn: The Landscapes, January-February 1988
Lewiston, Maine, Bates College, Museum of Art, Olin Arts Center, Notations of Color: Oil Sketching in Maine, August-November 1998

Bruce Robertson, Marsden Hartley, New York, 1995, p. 32, illustrated in color

Marsden Hartley devoted much of his career to reinventing landscape painting according to his deeply personal vision of nature and unique aesthetic aims.  As a child, Hartley was drawn to the woods and fields of his rural Maine surroundings, but it was not until an introduction to Emersonian transcendentalism at the Cleveland School of Art in 1898 that nature assumed a spiritual presence in his life.  Emerson’s Essays instilled in him a belief in the redemptive power of the natural world and motivated his search for spiritual truth.  He moved to New York in the fall of 1899, and eventually enrolled in the National Academy of Design, where he was moved by the landscapes of John Henry Twachtman and George Inness.  The thriving cultural scene in New York was ideal for Hartley’s own quest for knowledge and self-actualization, however, each summer he was drawn back to a different rural area of Maine.  Hartley’s attraction to the distinctive terrain of his home state was undeniable.  He later expressed the devotion as something instinctive: “Nativeness is built of such primitive things, and whatever is one’s nativeness, one holds and never loses no matter how far afield the traveling may be” (Gail Scott, Marsden Hartley, 1988, p. 166).  Once his stipend to attend the National Academy of Design expired, Hartley eventually returned to Maine and approached his ambition as a painter with new focus.  

Encouraged by a successful exhibition at Green Acre, a spiritual community in Eliot, Maine, and a sale to well-known Boston collector of French Impressionism, Desmond Fitzgerald, Hartley retreated to North Lovell, Maine in the winter of 1908 to devote his full energy to painting.  He lived in virtual isolation in an abandoned farmhouse and produced rigorous renderings of the mountainous landscapes.  He believed the resulting body of work to be his first “mature” paintings.  He wrote: “I am happily contented to be climbing the heights and the clouds by the brush method…rendering the God-spirit in the mountains.”…I think nature is never quite so dramatic as when she is bared to the brow and shows her face in sturdy acceptance of the coming cold and dreariness.”  Barbara Haskell writes of this period in his career: “Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Hartley’s new approach to painting is that it began in virtual isolation, without direct exposure to the developments which had taken place in Europe.  Through reproductions [Hartley was inspired by the work of Giovanni Segantini he saw reproduced in a 1903 copy of Jugend], Hartley evolved a painting style based on discrete strokes of intense color that set him apart….Discarding conventional perspective, Hartley united foreground and background in a single continuous plane” (Marsden Hartley, 1980, p. 14). 

Compositionally, Carnival of Autumn is closely related to two canvases Hartley produced in 1908: The White Birches (location unknown) and Maine Landscape (Private Collection, Michigan).  Hartley’s newfound command of color and confidence in exploring formal relationships is unmistakable in Carnival of Autumn.  He channels nature’s latent power into muscular forms virtually resisting each other within the confines of the picture plane.  The mountains, sky and clouds, activated by staccato brushstokes and vibrant color, are packed into the scene, creating a formal tension he would continue to explore throughout his career.  The bare birches are evidence of his disinterest in Western conventions of perspective; acting as a screen-like device, they at once suggest and deny recession into space.