The Last of New England—The Beginning of New Mexico

Marsden Hartley · 1918–19

Medium

Oil on paperboard

Original size

61 × 76.3 cm (24 × 30 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Modernism

A painting of transition and longing, this work captures Marsden Hartley at a pivotal crossroads — both geographically and artistically — as he moved between the granite coasts of Maine and the red earth of the American Southwest. Hartley was one of the first American modernists to fully absorb European Expressionism, having spent formative years in Germany before the First World War shattered that world for him. By 1918–19, back on American soil, his palette had grown earthier and more introspective. The bold, flattened forms and stark colour contrasts in this piece reveal an artist reconciling two very different landscapes within a single image, painting from memory and grief as much as observation. Hartley worked on paperboard here rather than canvas, a choice common in his more intimate, experimental compositions, and one that gives the surface a particular density and warmth unusual in large-scale modernist work. Our hand-painted oil reproduction transfers that same weighted quality — the deliberate brushwork, the compressed horizon, the emotional tension between regions — onto canvas, giving you a faithful rendering of an artwork that has rarely left the Art Institute of Chicago's collection.