Fun Facts Friday: Marsden Hartley

Marsden Hartley (4 January, 1877 – 2 September, 1943) was an American essayist, poet and modernist painter.

Books by Marsden Hartley*

1. Born in Lewiston, Maine as Edmund, Mr. Hartley was the youngest of nine children.
2. His mother died when he was eight years old, his father married Martha Marsden four years later. In his early twenties, he assumed the name Marsden.
3. When Mr. Hartley was 14 years old, his family moved to Ohio, but he stayed in Maine working in a shoe factory.
4. A year later he joined his family in Cleveland and began training at the Cleveland School of Art.
5. Hartley excelled at the Cleveland School of Art, which gave him the opportunity and financial backing to study at New York’s William Merritt Chase’s School of Art and the National Academy of Design (winning the Academy’s Suydam Silver Medal for still-life drawing).
6. At age 22 Mr. Hartley traveled in Europe and met writers and artists in Paris including Gertrude Stein and her circle of friends.
7. World War I forced Mr. Hartley to come back to New York, he began wandering from place to place painting and writing.
8. In 1923 his book Twenty-five Poems was published in Paris.
9. In 1930 Mr. Hartley moved back to Maine and declared he wanted to become “the painter of Maine”.
10. When Alfred Stieglitz decided he would stop paying for the storage of Hartley’s paintings, the artists’ angry response was to burn one hundred of his works on his 58^th birthday – thus freeing himself from the financial burden.

Books by Marsden Hartley*

Zohar — Man of la Book
*Ama­zon links point to an affil­i­ate account