Marsden Hartley arrived in Santa Fe on June 12th of 1918 after a three-day train journey across the United States. He was greeted by stunning weather and the strong sunlight of the American Southwest. Maurice Sterne and his wife, Mabel Dodge, and the painter Paul Burlin were there to welcome him upon his arrival. The invitation to New Mexico had, in fact, been offered by a Mrs. Converse, a wealthy woman who was keen to take painting and drawing lessons from Hartley. Mrs. Converse offered to underwrite some of his travel and living expenses in exchange for schooling in painting and drawing. Hartley was usually against such arrangements, but the financial stress of a difficult market in New York was wearing on him, and he needed the reliability of a stipend and the promise of a better market for his work.

Hartley was immediately taken with the landscape and the brilliance and beauty that surrounded him. In New York, he had been recently uninspired. His dealer, Alfred Stieglitz, had determined to close his gallery “291,” and Hartley was saddened and left wanting for creativity to forge a new direction. To further complicate matters, he was quite anxious about his future within the marketplace with Stieglitz no longer at the helm. It was possible that he might find an outlet through other dealers of the time, such as Charles Daniel or the Montross Gallery, but this was less than certain. A change of scenery was the opportunity he needed.

Santa Fe and the views around Taos provided endless beauty. The mountain panoramas inspired him as he developed an increasingly abstract style in his landscapes. His still life paintings often featured items of interest from the region. While working out of doors, Hartley began using strong colors again, as he invoked the sparkling light around him.

Hartley worked mostly in pastel in New Mexico, and he created only a few oil paintings of the landscape. Pastel offered the perfect combination of extraordinarily rich palette of high-keyed colors and also the easy portability that would allow him to go out into the desert and create visions of the landscape. In letters to Stieglitz, he noted that the colors in New Mexico were rather different from the reds and yellows he had envisioned and instead offered blue and green and pink and purple, colors seen in his most vibrant pastels such as this New Mexico Landscape.

While he was enticed by the landscape and remained fascinated by the pageantry of the Native Americans, Hartley had a difficult time fitting in while in New Mexico. The promise of a steady income from Mrs. Converse had been overestimated and Hartley expressed disdain toward many of the local painters whom he considered to be amateurs. His artistic prowess and astonishingly innovative creative spirit were often undone by his gruff personality and tendency toward melancholy. Although disconnected from the artists and others around him, he was riveted by the Southwest landscape, as seen most clearly in his pastels of the region. These works remain among his most abstract and innovative explorations of the landscape and provide an important backdrop for his later renowned views of Mont St. Victoire.