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

Hartley was born in Lewiston, Maine,[1] where his English parents had settled. He was the youngest of nine children.[2] His mother died when he was eight, and his father remarried four years later to Martha Marsden.[3] His birth name was Edmund Hartley; he later assumed Marsden as his first name when he was in his early 20s.[2]

Hartley began his art training at the Cleveland Institute of Art after his family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1892.[1] He won a scholarship to the Cleveland School of Art.[1]

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.[1] 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.[1]

Maturation and New York exhibitions
Young American Artists of the Modern School, L. to R. Jo Davidson, Edward Steichen, Arthur B. Carles, John Marin; back Marsden Hartley, Laurence Fellows, c. 1911, Bates College Museum of Art.

Hartley moved to an abandoned farm near Lovell, Maine, in 1908.[1] He considered the paintings he produced there his first mature works, and they also impressed New York photographer and art promoter Alfred Stieglitz.[1] Hartley had his first solo exhibition at Stieglitz's 291 in 1909,[1] 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.
Hartley in Europe

Hartley first traveled to Europe in April 1912, and he became acquainted with Gertude Stein's circle of avante-garde writers and artists in Paris.[1] Stein, along with Hart Crane and Sherwood Anderson, encouraged Hartley to write as well as paint.[2]

In 1913, Hartley moved to Berlin, where he continued to paint and befriended the painters Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc.[1] He also collected Bavarian folk art.[4] His work during this period was a combination of abstraction and German Expressionism, fueled by his personal brand of mysticism.[1] Many of Hartley's Berlin paintings were further inspired by the German military pageantry then on display, though his view of this subject changed after the outbreak of World War I, once war was no longer a romantic but a real reality.[4] The earliest of his Berlin paintings were shown in the landmark 1913 Armory Show in New York.[3] In Berlin, Hartley developed a close relationship with a Prussian lieutenant, Karl von Freyburg, who was the cousin of Hartley's friend Arnold Ronnebeck. References to Freyburg were a recurring motif in Hartley's work,[4] most notably in Portrait of a German Officer (1914).[5] Freyburg's subsequent death during the war hit Hartley hard, and he afterward idealized their relationship.[4] Many scholars believe Hartley to have been gay, and have interpreted his work regarding Freyburg as embodying his homosexual feelings for him.[3]

Return to the U.S., and the painter of Maine
Hartley finally returned to the U.S. in early 1916.[1] He lived in Europe again from 1921 to 1930, when he moved back to the U.S. for good.[1] He painted throughout the country, in Massachusetts, New Mexico, California, and New York. He returned to Maine in 1937, after declaring that he wanted to become the painter of Maine and depict American life at a local level.[6] This aligned Hartley with the Regionalism movement, a group of artists active from the early- to-mid 20th century that attempted to represent a distinctly American art. He continued to paint in Maine, primarily scenes around Lovell and the Corea coast, until his death in Ellsworth in 1943.[2] His ashes were scattered on the Androscoggin River.