Landscape no. 26

Marsden Hartley · 1909–10

Medium

Oil on cardboard

Original size

30.5 × 30.5 cm (12 × 12 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Modernism

Landscape no. 26 belongs to a remarkable series of small-scale Maine landscapes Hartley produced around 1909–10, works that crackle with spiritual intensity despite their modest dimensions and humble cardboard support. At this stage in his career, Hartley was absorbing the influence of Cézanne alongside the thick, luminous divisionism of Giovanni Segantini, whose mountain paintings he encountered through reproductions. The result is a surface built up with short, directional strokes that seem to vibrate — foliage and hillside becoming almost interchangeable under a treatment that prioritises inner rhythm over topographic accuracy. Painting on cardboard rather than stretched canvas gave these early works a density and intimacy that formal preparation might have diluted. Hartley was also steeped in Emersonian transcendentalism during this period, and it shows: these are not landscapes observed so much as landscapes felt, each one a meditation on the idea that nature and spirit are a single unfolding thing. The hand-painted oil reproduction renders Hartley's layered brushwork stroke for stroke, preserving the textural vitality that makes the original so alive — the way paint accumulates into something that feels less like representation and more like presence.