Petunias from Lachaise's Garden

A major figure in American modernism, Marsden Hartley was among a group of avant-garde American painters leading the charge of expressive abstraction in the early twentieth century. Though he traveled the world in his younger days, Hartley was long affiliated with his home state of Maine, which became an important place of modernist ferment in the 1920s and 1930s. Ever devoted to his Yankee roots, Hartley wrote “On the Subject of Nativeness—A Tribute to Maine” in 1937, an essay on the artists and writers of Maine. 

In the same year, Hartley decided to leave New York and return to Maine on a more permanent basis. Petunias from Lachaise’s Garden was painted upon his return in honor of Hartley’s friend Gaston Lachaise, a celebrated French sculptor who lived in Maine. Lachaise’s unexpected death in 1935, prompted Hartley’s elegiac tribute to his friend represented by flowers grown in Lachaise’s garden.