Marsden Hartley (1877-1943)

During his time in Europe from 1912 to 1915, Marsden Hartley became acquainted with Franz Marc, Wassily Kandinksy and the Blaue Reiter group, who introduced him to various traditional Bavarian folk arts such as the reverse-oil-on-glass (hinterglasbilder) painting tradition, of which Kandinsky was particularly fond. Although this was his first exposure to the art form, it was not until 1917, after he had returned to America, that Hartley experimented with works on glass. He spent that summer at an art colony in Ogunquit, Maine sponsored by the art critic and patron, Hamilton Easter Field, who "had recently begun collecting nineteenth century American folk art, and he encouraged the young modernists at his colony to use the older art as a source for developing a quintessential American aesthetic." (K. Wilson in E.M. Kornhauser, ed., Marsden Hartley, New Haven, Connecticut, 2002, p. 301)