Marsden Hartley

Happy Birthday Marsden Hartley! American, born in 1887, was a painter and member of the “Stieglitz Circle”, a group of Modernist painters, who painted primarily abstracted landscapes. His painterly, colorful style is well represented in Mountain Lake-Autumn. This painting can be compared to Cezanne’s Le Mount Sainte Victoire.

Painterly (Ger.-malerisch) is a term referring to feeling of form rather than outlining, with use of color patches, extreme lights and darks, and thick use of the paint. Background and foreground seem to merge with one another in spots. In Renaissance painting, Rembrandt would be considered painterly, while Michelangelo decidedly not. The technique became quite popular with the Impressionists.

Hartley                                                                                                                                        Cezanne