Still Life No. 15

Marsden Hartley · c. 1917

Medium

Oil on composition board

Original size

59.4 × 49.5 cm (23 3/8 × 19 1/2 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Modernism

Still Life No. 15 is a quietly compelling work that reveals Marsden Hartley at a pivotal point in his career, balancing European modernist influence with a distinctly American sensibility. Hartley spent the early 1910s in Germany and Paris, absorbing Cézanne's structural approach to still life and the bold chromatic intensity of the German Expressionists. By 1917, those influences had settled into something more personal — objects rendered with firm, defining outlines, color used not to describe light but to assert presence, and a compositional logic that feels both monumental and intimate. His choice of composition board rather than canvas gives the surface a particular density, the paint sitting with unusual directness against the ground. Hartley was one of the first American painters to seriously engage with European avant-garde movements while remaining deeply rooted in the experience of his native Maine, and that tension between the cosmopolitan and the vernacular runs through even his most modest-seeming still lifes. This hand-painted oil reproduction is made to the same dimensions as the original, using traditional oil pigments on prepared board, so the weight and warmth of Hartley's brushwork translates with the fidelity that print reproduction simply cannot provide.