Marsden Hartley (January 4, 1877 - September 2, 1943) was an American painter in the early 20th century. Hartley was born in Lewiston, Maine, USA. He began his art training at the Cleveland Art Institute after moving to Cleveland, Ohio in 1892. At the age of 22, he moved to New York City where he attended the National Academy of Design and studied painting with William Merritt Chase. While in New York, he came to the attention of Alfred Stieglitz and became associated with Stieglitz' Gallery 291 Group. His painting Portrait of a German Officer ^* (1914), was an ode to Karl von Freyburg, a Prussian lieutenant with whom he became enamored before his death in World War I.

Marsden Hartley was a nomadic painter for much of his life, but after spending several years in Europe, he returned to his hometown in Maine. He wanted to become "the painter of Maine" and depict American life at a local level. In this way, he is a member of the regionalists, a group of artists from the early 20th century that attempted to represent a distinctly "American Art"

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Volume 21, number 2: Copley's Cargo
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In 1765, John Singleton Copley sent his painting Henry Pelham (Boy with a Squirrel) from Boston to London in hopes of receiving feedback from the arbiters of academic aesthetics. Several months later, he received the welcome news that Sir Joshua Reynolds had called the painting "wonderfull." In virtually every scholarly narrative of early American art, Boy with a Squirrel derives its canonical significance from this famous transatlantic relay. But the most basic reality of that relay–the massive fact of the Atlantic Ocean standing between Copley and his interlocutors–has barely been registered in the scholarship.This essay interprets Boy with a Squirrel in terms of the difficulty and delicacy of its transatlantic transmission. I argue that Copley, as he attempted to create a painting that would have the necessary transitive qualities, drew from an array of familiar discourses of Atlantic exchange and transport. The painting's profile format evoked strategies of numismatic exchange. The precise representation of the flying squirrel tapped into well-established transatlantic natural history circuits. The spatial transformations of the composition echoed not only empiricist theories of sensory conveyance (especially the writings of George Berkeley), but also mirrored the workaday dynamics of the shipping and reassembly of transatlantic commodities. Copley, like many other colonial artists, worked in a global community governed by distance, difference, and delay. By attending to the vehicular context of Boy with a Squirrel, we can begin to understand his strategies for articulating–and navigating–that new global space.

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