Marsden Hartley 1877 - 1943

Charles Hovey Pepper, Concord, Massachusetts (acquired from the artist)
By descent in the family to the present owner

Good condition. Under UV: one small spot of inpainting in the top center edge, upper and lower left edges. One small area of inpainting in the center right edge of a dime sized area of inpainting in tree right of center.
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We are grateful to Gail R. Scott for preparing the following essay. Ms. Scott, a leading Hartley scholar, is the author of the monograph Marsden Hartley (New York, 1998) and the editor of collections on the artist's poetry and essays on art.

Charles Hovey Pepper (1864-1950) grew up in Waterville, Maine where his father was the first president of Colby College. After attending Colby himself, Pepper decided to pursue the arts professionally, and ultimately studied with many of the most influential teachers of the day including Alger V. Currier and Kenyon Cox. In 1893 Pepper, his wife and young son, Stephen, moved to France where he studied at the Académie Julian. Having discovered Japanese prints while in Europe, Charles decided to also visit Japan. Following this extensive sojourn, the family eventually settled in Concord, Massachusetts where Pepper maintained a studio in the Fenway region of Boston. The studio walls were hung with works by many artists, many of whom were his friends and contemporaries, including Edgar Degas, Charles Prendergast, Edward Hopper and Marsden Hartley. Pepper’s work was in accord with what George Hitchcock told his pupils: “If a landscape painter is an artist, he paints effects, not things.”

In his biography of Charles Hovey Peper, Joseph Coburn Smith relates the story of acquiring Song of Winter by Marsden Hartley:

One day Pepper answered a knock on his studio door and a thin young man with a bundle came in. He said that he was Marsden Hartley and that he had been painting in Maine, in the vicinity of Poland Springs, living in a cabin and doing for himself. He looked hungry, too, Pepper thought. Hartley had just shown his paintings to Philip Hale who thought that Pepper would like to see them. They were small oils on wood panels, showing mountains under snow, sun and rain. 'They were fresh and jewel-like in color and painted in small dabs,' Pepper remembers, and he bought one. Later he occasionally came into contact with Hartley in Vence, Southern France, in New York, and in Boston. 'I watched with interest his development and change of approach. He always kept his fresh, pure color, but added simplicity and power.' Marsden Hartley worked a deal in his native state of Maine in his later years and died in 1943, just as belated recognition had come his way (Joseph Coburn Smith, Charles Hovey Pepper, Portland, Maine, 1945, pp. 39-40).

Aside from Joseph Coburn Smith's biography of Charles Hovey Pepper, we know that Charles’ son, Stephen C. Pepper (1891-1972), graduated from Harvard, gained a great love of art as a result of his father’s illustrious career and his early education and experience in France and Japan and other cultural centers around the world—so much so that he eventually became a famous philosopher, aesthetician, and art theorist. Stephen Pepper taught for most of his career at the University of California, Berkeley where he was chair of the Art Department and was responsible for bringing the artists into the academic circle. He was friends with many of the California Bay Area artists of the 1940s and ‘50s, including David Parks, Richard Diebenkorn, and Earle Loran. Stephen Pepper gave many of his father’s paintings to Colby College in honor of his father and grandfather.