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# Marsden Hartley’s Ten Most Famous Paintings
- URL: https://blog.fineartamerica.com/marsden-hartley-ten-most-famous-paintings/
- Published: 2026-04-23T13:58:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-24T20:49:47.000Z
- Description: Berlin insignia, Maine mountains, and a red lobster on black: the ten works that define America’s most restless modernist.
- Author: Fine Art America
- Tags: Famous Paintings, Art History

Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) was born in Lewiston, Maine, the youngest child of English mill workers, and lost his mother at eight — a wound he wrote about for the rest of his life. Alfred Stieglitz gave him his first show at the 291 gallery in New York in 1909, and for the next three decades Hartley moved almost continuously: Paris, Berlin, New Mexico, Provincetown, Bermuda, Mexico, the Bavarian Alps, Nova Scotia. He was chronically short of money and chronically homesick for a place he had not yet identified.

That place turned out to be the state he had started from. In the late 1930s he came back to Maine, declared himself “the painter from Maine,” and produced the blunt, heavy-outlined landscapes and still lifes that are now considered his finest work. Along the way he had already made some of the boldest abstractions any American painter attempted before the Second World War. Here are ten of his most famous paintings.

## [Portrait of a German Officer](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/5-portrait-of-a-german-officer-marsden-hartley.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Portrait of a German Officer by Marsden Hartley](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/5-portrait-of-a-german-officer-marsden-hartley-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/5-portrait-of-a-german-officer-marsden-hartley.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Hartley’s single most celebrated painting, made in Berlin in 1914, contains no face at all. Instead a soldier is assembled from insignia: an Iron Cross, regimental flags, checkerboards, spurs, a helmet, the initials “K.v.F.,” the number 4 and the number 24\. The subject was Karl von Freyburg, a young Prussian lieutenant and Hartley’s beloved friend, killed in the opening weeks of the First World War at the age of twenty-four. It is an elegy disguised as a pattern, and one of the earliest paintings by an American to absorb Cubism and German Expressionism without imitating either. It hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

## [Mt. Katahdin](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/mt-katahdin-marsden-hartley.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Mt. Katahdin by Marsden Hartley](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/mt-katahdin-marsden-hartley-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/mt-katahdin-marsden-hartley.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Katahdin is the highest mountain in Maine, and in October 1939 Hartley spent eight days camped at its foot. He came away with a subject he painted more than a dozen times in the last four years of his life: a dark pyramid rising over a band of red autumn hillside, a stripe of blue lake in the foreground, two flat white clouds parked in the sky. The forms are reduced almost to a child’s drawing, the paint laid on thick and unblended. Hartley called the experience of the mountain a kind of religious encounter, and the pictures have the finality of something seen once and never revised.

## [Painting No. 48](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/4-painting-no-48-marsden-hartley.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Painting No. 48 by Marsden Hartley](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/4-painting-no-48-marsden-hartley-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/4-painting-no-48-marsden-hartley.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

One of the great abstractions of Hartley’s Berlin years, painted in 1913 before the war began. A numeral 8, a white eight-pointed star, a cross, and banner-like triangles of red, yellow, and blue are locked together like a heraldic shield taken apart and reassembled. Hartley was intoxicated by the spectacle of imperial Berlin — the parades, the uniforms, the sheer visual noise of it — and he found a way to paint that pageantry flat, bright, and pattern-like. Kandinsky and Franz Marc, whom he had met through the Blue Rider circle, encouraged him in exactly this direction.

## [Smelt Brook Falls](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/2-smelt-brook-falls-marsden-hartley.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Smelt Brook Falls by Marsden Hartley](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/2-smelt-brook-falls-marsden-hartley-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/2-smelt-brook-falls-marsden-hartley.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Painted in 1937 at West Brooksville on the Maine coast, this is Hartley’s waterfall reduced to essentials: a white torrent dropping between dark rock walls, thick trunks rising on either side, everything pressed close to the picture surface with almost no sky. The water is rendered in slabs of white pigment that sit up off the canvas, more like carved plaster than a river. The picture belongs to the moment when Hartley stopped trying to be an international modernist and started painting the north as something hard, cold, and physical — which turned out to be the making of him.

## [Lobster on Black Background](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/1-lobster-on-black-background-marsden-hartley.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Lobster on Black Background by Marsden Hartley](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/1-lobster-on-black-background-marsden-hartley-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/1-lobster-on-black-background-marsden-hartley.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

A single scarlet lobster lies against a field of pure black, claws forward, painted with heavy outlines and no shadow whatsoever. It is a still life stripped of everything a still life usually has — no table, no cloth, no companion objects — leaving one emphatic red shape and the void behind it. Hartley made a group of these Maine subjects in his final years, alongside pictures of fishermen and gulls, and their deliberate crudeness was a choice, not a failing. He wanted the directness of a fisherman’s sign painted on a shack, and he got it.

## [Movement No. 5, Provincetown Houses](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/2-movement-no-5-provincetown-houses-marsden-hartley.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Movement No. 5, Provincetown Houses by Marsden Hartley](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/2-movement-no-5-provincetown-houses-marsden-hartley-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/2-movement-no-5-provincetown-houses-marsden-hartley.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Hartley spent the summer of 1916 in Provincetown, on the tip of Cape Cod, in the company of a lively colony of writers and painters. The white clapboard houses of the town, the masts and the tilted sails in the harbor beyond, are broken here into interlocking flat planes of white, ochre, and brick red — recognizable and abstract at the same time. He gave the pictures musical titles because he was thinking about rhythm rather than description. This is one of the clearest examples of American Cubism produced during the First World War.

## [New Mexico Recollection No. 8](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/1-new-mexico-recollection-no-8-marsden-hartley.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![New Mexico Recollection No. 8 by Marsden Hartley](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/1-new-mexico-recollection-no-8-marsden-hartley-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/1-new-mexico-recollection-no-8-marsden-hartley.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Hartley lived in New Mexico from 1918 to 1919 and found the desert difficult to paint on the spot. Only after he moved to Berlin in the early 1920s did the landscape come back to him, and he produced the New Mexico Recollections from memory, thousands of miles away. Low mesas run across the canvas under a bank of heavy gray cloud, the desert floor built from muted pinks and grays with clumps of blue-green scrub laid over it like a swell at sea. The series is unlike anything else in American landscape painting of the period — a place remembered rather than observed, and heavier and sadder for it.

## [Popocatépetl, Spirited Morning — Mexico](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/popocatepetl-spirited-morning-mexico-marsden-hartley.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Popocatépetl, Spirited Morning — Mexico by Marsden Hartley](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/popocatepetl-spirited-morning-mexico-marsden-hartley-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/popocatepetl-spirited-morning-mexico-marsden-hartley.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

A Guggenheim Fellowship took Hartley to Mexico in 1932, and he settled for a time within sight of the volcano Popocatépetl. The mountain appears here as a white cone floating on a deep blue-black mass, ringed and half-swallowed by great rounded cumulus clouds that take up most of the canvas. The clouds are so solid and the mountain so ghostly that the usual relationship between them is reversed. Hartley was reading mystical literature intensively during these months, and the picture carries some of that charge — a landscape treated frankly as an apparition.

## [Whale’s Jaw, Dogtown Common, Cape Ann, Massachusetts](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/whales-jaw-dogtown-common-cape-ann-massachusetts-marsden-hartley.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Whale’s Jaw, Dogtown Common, Cape Ann, Massachusetts by Marsden Hartley](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/whales-jaw-dogtown-common-cape-ann-massachusetts-marsden-hartley-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/whales-jaw-dogtown-common-cape-ann-massachusetts-marsden-hartley.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Dogtown is an abandoned inland settlement on Cape Ann, near Gloucester — a moor of scrub and glacial boulders left behind when its residents drifted away in the early nineteenth century. Hartley painted there in the early 1930s and was gripped by it, describing the place as looking like a piece of ancient Assyria. The Whale’s Jaw is a split boulder that resembles a set of open mandibles, painted here in slabs of rust, ochre, and gray with the scrub burning red around it. He considered these Dogtown pictures a turning point in his work.

## [The Lost Felice](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/3-the-lost-felice-marsden-hartley.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![The Lost Felice by Marsden Hartley](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/3-the-lost-felice-marsden-hartley-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/3-the-lost-felice-marsden-hartley.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

In 1935 and 1936 Hartley lodged with a fishing family in Nova Scotia and found, briefly, the sense of belonging he had spent his life looking for. In September 1936 two of the sons drowned in a storm. The paintings that followed — dark-eyed, heavy-limbed figures arranged frontally like a folk altarpiece — are memorials to them. Here a central figure in white holds a dish of fish in bright red hands, flanked by two dark-robed figures with mask-like faces. Hartley took the archaic, unmodulated look deliberately from religious folk painting, and it gives these late figures a weight almost nothing else in American art of the 1930s has.

Hartley spent forty years moving between countries and styles and is often described as a painter who never settled. Looked at together, though, the work has a consistent temperament: blunt, saturated, emotionally direct, with color that carries feeling rather than describing surfaces. A Katahdin or a Dogtown boulder brings genuine weight to a wall, and his still lifes hold a room the way a good piece of folk carving does.

[Shop Marsden Hartley prints here](https://fineartamerica.com/art/marsden+hartley?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com), and explore the rest of our famous paintings collection for more of the world’s most beloved masterpieces.