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Marsden Harley (1877-1943) was a distinguished American painter, writer, and spiritual seeker. In his introduction to this generously illustrated volume, Townsend Ludington explores the relationships among Hartley's art, poetry, and essays. He traces the philosophical and literary sources that nourished the artist's evolving spiritual consciousness.
Raised in Lewiston, Maine, Hartley felt at odds with life. A voracious reader, he educated himself and became enamored of the transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and, particularly, of Walt Whitman. He began spending winters in New York City, where he met and was befriended by Alfred Stieglitz. He visited Europe but remained restless for the right physical environment. Eventually returning to New England, Hartley visited the Dogtown area in the low hills behind the port of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and the stark landscape there stimulated some of his most famous paintings.
Throughout his career, Hartley painted landscapes, still lifes, figure pieces, and seascapes in which he tried to convey his sense of wonder of the earth, at the same time attempting to articulate the spiritual awareness that came to him in "the magic of dreams." Consciously representative of modernism, Hartley strove to express, as Wallace Stevens said, "not ideas about the thing but the thing itself." He believed that the acts of reading, writing, and painting gave significance to the world accessible to his senses.
