Mount Katahdin, Maine

Artist: Marsden Hartley (American, 1877–1943)

Original Dimensions: 29 15/16" x 40 1/8"

Location: National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

About Artwork:  (1942) "During the late 1930s the aging Marsden Hartley experienced a number of personal and professional reversals that prompted him to return to his native state to reinvent himself as a Maine artist. In September 1937, he settled in Bangor, where he realized a long-standing objective to paint Mount Katahdin, Maine’s highest mountain. Katahdin’s unspoiled beauty had attracted such notables as Henry David Thoreau and Frederic Edwin Church, and it was heavily promoted as a tourist destination in Hartley’s lifetime. The artist spent eight days in October 1939 making sketches of Katahdin that formed the basis of the approximately 18 oil paintings of it that he produced over the next three years. Executed in 1942, Mount Katahdin, Maine is one of the last and most successful paintings in the series.

Mount Katahdin, Maine was not intended to be a literal view of the mountain, but rather an evocation of its grandeur that captures a seasonal mood. Hartley exercised artistic license by centering Baxter Peak, the mountain’s highest point, and bringing it closer to the foreground than it really appeared from his vantage point. The reductive composition consists of four horizontal zones: the lake, the foliage, the mountain, and the sky. Hartley’s cloud forms are particularly distinctive. They appear to have the same weight and be made of the same substance as the mountain, and yet, barely escaping Katahdin’s gravitational force, they rise and float free against the sky. Such unusual insights reveal Hartley to be an American visionary painter in the tradition of Albert Pinkham Ryder, an artist he greatly admired." - (National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.)