Bowdoin College Museum of Art | - Study for Poster Portrait: Marsden Hartley

Preview image of work. watercolor and graphite on paper, Study for Poster Portrait: Marsden Hartley 29457

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Study for Poster Portrait: Marsden Hartley

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Artist

Charles Henry Demuth (Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 11/8/1883 - 10/23/1935, Lancaster, Pennsylvania)

Title

Study for Poster Portrait: Marsden Hartley

Creation Date

ca. 1923-1924

Century

early 20th century

Dimensions

10 1/8 x 8 1/8 in. (25.72 x 20.64 cm)

Object Type

watercolor

Creation Place

North America, United States

Medium and Support

watercolor and graphite on paper

Credit Line

Yale University Art Gallery, Stephen Carlton Clark, B.A. 1903, Fund and Everett V. Meeks, B.A. 1901, Fund, , photo credit: Yale University Art Gallery

Copyright

This artwork may be under copyright. For further information, please consult the Museum’s Copyright Terms and Conditions.

Given his friendships with Alfred Stieglitz, Gertrude Stein, and Marcel Duchamp, it might come as a surprise that the painter Charles Demuth was comparatively late in experimenting with unconventional portraits, but his works nevertheless rank among the best-known examples. This watercolor sketch and a completed portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe (1923–24) inaugurated a series dedicated to major contributors to American arts and letters. Here Demuth employs the same motif of a still life before a framed landscape that Marsden Hartley himself first painted in Bermuda, where the pair wintered in 1917. Items associated with the elder artist abound, including a snow-covered mountain, reminiscent of his home state of Maine. The upside-down heart shape of the bright scarlet anthurium (a flower favored by Hartley) puns on the first syllable of the subject’s last name.