Born On This Day- January 4th... American Painter Mardsen Hartley

He is one of my favorite artists from one of my favorite periods. Mardsen Hartley is one of the great artists & most intriguing figures in the art world. Tall, awkward, driven, he arrived in New York in 1899 at age 22. He was born in Lewiston, Maine in 1877. Hartley later settled in Cleveland to study art, already seasoned by solitude & a sense that he was gay. He survived a childhood of Dickensian proportions: the early death of his mother, abandonded by his father & a life of poverty that forced him to leave school at 15 & go to work in a shoe factory. Hartley: ''My childhood was vast with terror and surprise.”



In true Dickensian style, he would be rescued as a young adult by sponsors & patrons attracted to his obvious talent & charisma. He enjoyed summer retreats in Maine, where he started a lifelong interest in literature & religious thought: Emerson, Thoreau, Henry James & Walt Whitman. They paid for him to study at the National Academy of Design in Manhattan. For several years he studied in New York & painted in Maine, where landscape was his first & last great subject. In 1909 he met Alfred Stieglitz, who immediately gave him an exhibition and made him a prominent member of the select circle of American Modern Artists.


Most of his life he never lived anywhere for more than 2 years, his restlessness taking him to most cultural capitals nearly every Modernist circle or salon, including those centered on Gertrude Stein. He had little critical recognition & never made money from his work; he never had a longtime partner, & never really had a family. The young German soldier that he loved was killed in WW I; the virile, attractive & masculine sons of the fishing family he stayed with 2 summers in Nova Scotia were tragically drowned.

Hartley was an artist with a great love of great paintings who wanted to make his own & have them be viewed as great. He succeeded because he embraced life, painful as it was.


The seminude portraits of swimmers & wrestlers that he made in Maine in the late 1930's are among the most powerfully sexual images of men ever painted. Hartley was also an accomplished poet & essayist. It could not have been easy to face the difficulties of being a gay artist in an era when public admission was taboo & costly. His work is featured in the Hide/Seek exhibit at the Smithsonian Portrait Gallery, as is his portrait by his friend George Platt Lynes.

Photograph by George Platt Lynes

''I want to paint the livingness of appearances.”