MARSDEN HARTLEY 1877-1943
Birds of the Bagaduce, 1939
Oil on board, 28 X 22" (71.12 x 55.88 cm.)
Signed, lower right
Museum purchase, 957-0-113

Birds of the Bagaduce is one of several paintings that Marsden Hartley produced in 1939 while staying with John Evans and Claire Spencer in West Brookville, Maine. On August 27, he wrote to the California painter Nick Brigante: "The friends I am staying with bought this pretty farm on the edge of the Bagaduce River which is around the point from the Penobscot & flows into the bay, & across the river is Castine, one of Maine's most historical cities.
That same year, Hartley also used the name "Bagaduce" for another of his pictures, Driftwood on the Bagaduce (1939, The Saint Louis Art Museum). It was only two years earlier, in the summer of 1937, that Hartley finally returned to paint in his native state. Despite the many years since he had left Lewiston, where he was born, Hartley maintained an intimate and powerful bond to the Maine landscape and seashore.
Hartley's decision to paint sailboats at sea beneath a dramatic sky with emphasized clouds reflects his admiration for the work of Albert Pinkham Ryder. He had not forgotten Ryder, whom he had met years earlier, since about this time he painted from memory Portrait of Albert Pinkham Ryder (1938-39, The Metropolitan Museum of Art) and wrote an essay on Ryder in 1936: "Will the ships ever reach a psychical, let alone a physical haven, do they not seem to be held in perpetuity to the hard business of roaming from one indifferent wave to another... That is the look of the pictures, two small marines, of which I am thinking, having looked this afternoon for probably the hundredth time in the Metropolitan Museum, I see no hope for their ships ever reaching a prescribed safety." Hartley had first seen the works of the eccentric Ryder in New York in 1909 and painted a series of dark landscapes under his influence. In contrast, Birds of the Bagaduce is filled with light, yet the relationship of ship to cloud suggests Ryder's Under a Cloud or Toilers of the Sea (both n.d., both The Metropolitan Museum of Art).
Hartley often represented sailboats at sea beneath large solid clouds in a vast sky. The personal meaning of these elements can be found in his life experiences. By 1939, he had twice lost close friends to tragedies at sea. He memorialized the poet Hart Crane's suicide at sea in his 1933 painting Eight Bells Folly, Memorial for Hart Crane (1933, University Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis). Only three years later, while he was living in Nova Scotia, Alty Mason, the handsome young fisherman whom he adored, was drowned at sea.
In its own way, Birds of the Bagaduce treats the same theme as Hartley's poem, "Fishermen's Last Supper," in his 1940 collection Androscoggin:

Murder is not a pretty thing yet seas do raucous everything to make it pretty for the foolish or the brave, a way seas have.

The immense area that Hartley allocated for sky and clouds in this picture suggests the power of nature. In contrast, man's boats are small and vulnerable. The birds of the Bagaduce seem free as they fly above the water. For Hartley, however, they can also be the victims of storms, as some of his pictures which depict dead birds make clear.

GAIL LEVIN