Marsden Hartley’s painting Autumn Impressional is like a blast of cool air descending on the viewer from its place of origin, the mountains of western Maine. The painting dates to the earliest years of the artist's career—a period marked by a burst of creative productivity that would soon distinguish him as a force to be reckoned with in the American art world. The motif of this painting—a mountain seen through a foreground of spruce and birch trees and against a strip of sky full of billowing yet paradoxically solid cloud forms—was one that occupied him almost exclusively over a ten-year period between 1900 and 1910. Indeed, for the rest of his career, a major theme of his landscapes would focus on the mountain. From these foothills of the White Mountains to the desert mountains of New Mexico and on to a volcano in Mexico, Mont Saint Victoire in Aix-en-Provence, the Bavarian Alps, and finally, at the apex of his career, Maine's most iconic peak, Mt. Katahdin, Hartley was absorbed by the need to capture mountain identity. [1]

Born in Lewiston, Maine in 1877, Hartley moved to Cleveland to join other family members when he was sixteen. There he started his art training but was given a stipend to continue art school in New York City. For ten years, beginning in 1900 he would spend his summers in Maine visiting family in Lewiston but devoting most of his time to sketching and painting, first in the still wooded environs of Lewiston on the banks the Androscoggin River.

Not satisfied with these tame hillsides, however, Hartley yearned to be nearer to the bigger mountains that rise along Maine’s border with New Hampshire. By 1902 he had discovered a perfect location, a nine-mile ridge above Kezar Lake in the Lovell region. From this vantage point he had an unobstructed view of Speckled Mountain and beyond—the White Mountains and the grand peaks of the Presidential Range. Speaking of this spot on Kezar Lake in his autobiography, Somehow a Past, Hartley could well be describing Autumn Impressional: “I know of no handsomer scene than when the leaves have fallen and purple October has covered the land like a long stream of smoke. The clouds pile up in sort of a lighter purplish hue suffused with pale ochre.” [2]

Every year after that until 1911—Hartley returned to this remote region (accessible, as he says in the autobiography, only by stagecoach to Fryeburg and thence by wagon) for a period of weeks or months. There, in Center or North Lovell and the Stoneham Valley, he found lodging in a variety of rented quarters, living on next to nothing, and immersing himself in his subject. His sense of isolation was acute, and still finding his way, he was engulfed by self-doubt. “I have nothing but my own thoughts,” he confessed, “and these keep me in one continuous quandary as to how to survive the insweep of the sea of uncertainties.” Just finding daily necessities was difficult, as was getting around. Tramping everywhere by foot, he “got to know the country pretty much like a naturalist,” but, he added, “It took me four years to develop a sense of how to go about painting those hills” (SAP, 186).

Hartley found the needed guidance to navigate this “sea of uncertainties,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays, in particular the idea that the artist is a seer who looks beyond a commonplace fact or our mundane view of the world, transforming the apparent forms of nature in such a way as to reveal spiritual essences, the flux and unity of all things. Emerson’s view of the role of the artist bolstered Hartley’s awareness of his own artistic practice. Lamenting to his friend Richard Tweedy during the colorful autumn season of 1900, that all his work was very gray and that it “. . . was no use to try to paint Nature until I could get my color stronger,” he took practical steps to heighten his color. [3]

A breakthrough came a year later when Hartley saw colored reproductions—in the German publication, Die Jugend—of works by the Italian-Swiss artist Giovanni Segantini. Segantini had devised an idiosyncratic, stitch-like brushstroke that resulted in works of great clarity of light and color. Using what he understood of Segantini’s technique, Hartley found that he could apply paint in discrete “stitches” of pure color, thereby allowing more light and air in the canvas to intensify color. His confidence grew, so that by 1906 he had produced “a flood of canvases quite large with a direct sense of the topography of the scene which I had studied intimately” (SAP, 187). Among this group of early successes, Autumn Impressional stands as a masterful orchestration of heightened color harmonies. It was painted during that part of the autumn season that most appealed to Hartley—after an early snow, patches of which linger luminously in the dark-shadowed foreground. The birch trees are still green but tinged with autumn’s gold and orange. Describing this moment of the autumn season to a friend, he spoke of “the rich sober yet powerful color” when nature is most dramatic and “shows her face in sturdy acceptance of the coming cold . . . with the ‘cool unfolding’ purples and deep greens that mingle sedately with it, set off here and there with sketches of mauve white or cream gray.” It is like, he added, “a strong resonant octave out of Chopin, out of Grieg.” [4]

Among this series of large (30 x 40) mountain paintings, Autumn Impressional demonstrates how and why Hartley was to change the course of American art from the pleasant tameness of American impressionism or “the crepuscular moodiness of Tonalism, which dominated landscape painting at the beginning of the century.” [5] With no significant exposure to the pictorial discoveries of European modernism, Hartley was forging something very new. His experiments during this time (heightening color with the stitch technique, flattening space, creating pattern) were, however, merely vehicles for attaining his real purpose as an artist—to become the seer who could capture the idea, the spirit of the mountain, thereby transforming the secular into the sacred.

[1] See Jeanne Hokin, Pinnacles and Pyramids. Albuquerque NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1993 for an in-depth analysis of Hartley’s mountain paintings.

[2] Marsden Hartley, Somehow a Past, edited with an introduction by Susan Elizabeth Ryan. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997, 185 (hereafter in the text as SAP).

[3] Hartley letter to Richard Tweedy, October 25, 1900, Archives of American Art, Reel NY 59/5.

[4] Hartley letter to Horace Traubel, October 29, 1907, Heart’s Gate, 51.

[5] Roald Nasgaard, The Mystic North, Symbolist Landcape Painting in Northern Europe and North America 1890-1940. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984, 207.