This work is included in Gail R. Scott’s Marsden Hartley Legacy Project: Complete Paintings and Works on Paper with Bates College Museum of Art.

Landscape No. 15, 1909, belongs to a group of intimately sized and tightly focused landscape studies Marsden Hartley produced of birch trees. This period marked an important episode in Hartley’s artistic development: he earned his first solo exhibition in 1909, held at Alfred Stieglitz’ lauded 291 Gallery, where he also encountered the work of French master colorist Henri Matisse. “I do not sketch these days for I work almost wholly from the imagination—making pictures entirely from this point of view using the mountains only as backgrounds for ideas,” Hartley described. “This is difficult art—almost anybody can paint from nature—it calls for real expert power to create an idea and produce it as one sees it in the mind.” Landscape No. 15 reveals Hartley’s radical new approach to modernism, in which expressive, scumbled brushstrokes and bold use of color become not only technical tools but the subject of the composition.

A symbolist poem is inscribed by Hartley on the verso:

In the Beau Shop
The blithering drooling idiots
Sit – sit – sit
Lolling and sprawling
In the green gloom of a
Soot smeared lamp –
Sitting and sitting
Falling and crawling
Over each other
Drooling in the spit box! –
And they sit and sprawl
Fall & crawl
In and out
Of the grey green gloom!
Blithering idiots all –