Marsden Hartley

Marsden Hartley
Marsden Hartley in 1939
Born	Edmund Hartley (1877-01-04)January 4, 1877 Lewiston, Maine, USA
Died	September 2, 1943(1943-09-02) (aged 66) Ellsworth, Maine
Nationality	American
Education	Cleveland Institute of Art, National Academy of Design
Known for	Painting
Movement	American Modernism

Marsden Hartley (January 4, 1877 – September 2, 1943) was an American Modernist painter, poet, and essayist.

Hartley was born in Lewiston, Maine, where his English parents had settled. He was the youngest of nine children. His mother died when he was eight, and his father remarried four years later to Martha Marsden. His birth name was Edmund Hartley; he later assumed Marsden as his first name when he was in his early 20s. A few years after his mother's death when Hartley was 14, his family moved to Ohio, leaving him behind in Maine to work in a shoe factory for a year. These bleak occurrences led Hartley to recall his New England childhood as a time of painful loneliness, so much so that in a letter to Alfred Stieglitz, he once described the New England accent as "a sad recollection [that] rushed into my very flesh like sharpened knives."

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, Hartley 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 moved to an abandoned farm near Lovell, Maine, in 1908. He considered the paintings he produced there his first mature works, and they also impressed New York photographer and art promoter Alfred Stieglitz. Hartley had his first solo exhibition at Stieglitz's 291 in 1909, and exhibited his work there again in 1912. Stieglitz also provided Hartley's introduction to European modernist painters, of whom Cézanne, Picasso, and Matisse would prove the most influential upon him.