Marsden Hartley

Marsden Hartley (January 4, 1877 - September 2, 1943) was an American modernist artist, poet, and publicist. Hartley developed his pictorial abilities by observing the Cubists in Paris and Berlin. Hartley was born in Lewiston, Maine, where his English parents settled. He was the youngest of nine children. His mother died when he was eight years old, and his father married four years later on Martha Marsden. His birth name was Edmund Hartley; He later adopted Marsden with his name when he was just over 20 years old. A few years after the death of his mother, when Hartley was 14 years old, his family moved to Ohio, leaving him to Maine, where he worked for a year in a shoe factory. These gloomy incidents made Hartley recall his childhood in New England 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 memory [that] burst into my very flesh like sharpened knives. "After he joined his family in Cleveland, Ohio in 1892, Hartley began his art education at the Cleveland School of Art, where he received a scholarship. In 1898, at the age of 22, Hartley moved to New York to study painting at the New York School of Art with William Merritt Chase, and then entered the National Academy of Design. Hartley was a big fan of Albert Pinkham Ryder and visited his studio in Greenwich Village as often as possible. His friendship with Ryder, in addition to the work of Walt Whitman and American transcendentalists Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, inspired Hartley to view art as a spiritual lawsuit.