![]() ![]() Although his slow start in Vence delayed the first installment to the investors, compositions of fruit, flowers, vessels, and baskets helped him meet his first two years’ quota by July 1926. Instead, his output over the next year was dominated by still-life painting, a practice that had long paralleled his interest in botany and his appreciation of the work of Cézanne and Matisse. Although he found delight in visits to nearby Cannes, his artistic progress was plagued by bronchitis and rainy weather, and he eventually determined that the immediate countryside of Vence was “nice to look at but not to paint.” 7 In August 1925 Hartley settled in Vence in a house with a garden and a distant view of the Mediterranean. The initial offer was made without demand for compensation, but Hartley insisted sending his benefactors 10 paintings each year “so that I could feel I was earning my living thereby avoiding gifts.” 6 Griffin to provide Hartley with an annual stipend of $2000 for four years. ![]() Bullitt, who had recently married Hartley’s friend Louise Bryant, 5Ī syndicate of investors was organized by the New York banker William V. He was anxious to be financially independent from the demands of the art market, but it was not until 1924 that an economic solution presented itself. The sensations of nature that inspired Van Gogh remained foremost in Hartley’s consciousness when he returned to Europe after the first World War, having expressed to Stieglitz a desire to seek “fresh landscape experiences” in the south of France. With a “visionary quality that gives his canvases their beauty.” 3 He sought out Van Gogh’s paintings from the moment he arrived in Paris, describing the artist to Alfred Stieglitz as “an eminently spiritual being” 2 Hartley’s “mystical abstractions,” as he called them, drew inspiration from the paintings of Picasso and by the writings of Wassily Kandinsky, but he was also deeply moved by the art and letters of Vincent van Gogh. He sustained an innate belief that the spiritual in nature could only be acquired through direct experience of landscape. Although the mosaic-like compositions that he created during his first trip abroad in 1912 embodied his strong emotions about “the cosmic scene,” 1 Over the course of his artistic life, Marsden Hartley sought unmediated communion with open skies and rugged terrain. ![]()
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