About this work
High cliffs rendered in subtly blended browns, yellows, and reds — punctuated by spontaneous, calligraphic marks — dominate the composition, while rocky foreground, turbulent water, darkly silhouetted pine trees, and a bizarre cloudlike form in the sky build an atmosphere of foreboding. The eye is pulled downward into the granite foreground before being lifted toward that swollen, gravity-heavy sky. The painting sees nature as a vast arena of immense forms and forces: relations of space and scale are stylized so that the foreground rocks loom like mountains, while the middle-ground pines diminish far faster than they recede in depth, and a single swollen cloud bears down on the scene like an encroaching planet. The palette is deliberately muted — earth tones and bruised greens — and yet the picture hums with a barely contained physical energy.
Hartley spent the summer and fall of 1938 on Vinalhaven, Maine, and recalled his trip years later in dramatic seascapes such as this depiction of Hurricane Island.
He painted this scene at the age of sixty-five, a year before his death, after a long and successful career as a leading American modernist.
The work reflects a change in style from his earlier paintings, in which he had produced simple, geometric forms in bright, primary colors.
Unlike some of his landscape views painted from memory, *Hurricane Island, Vinalhaven, Maine* grew out of direct observation — a good example of the way Hartley could make the abstract strength of a picture correspond to the primal presence of its subject without worrying about accuracy of descriptive detail. It stands as one of the defining achievements of his late Maine period, when raw place and raw feeling became nearly indistinguishable.
This is a painting that earns its space on a wall rather than simply filling it. It asks to be hung where natural light shifts across it — a reading room, a study, a hallway facing north — so that the cliff tones deepen and flatten through the day. The atmospheric, brooding quality of the scene reflects a deeply personal and emotional interpretation of the natural world. It speaks to the viewer who wants more from landscape than scenery: someone drawn to tension held in stillness, to the feeling of standing on a Maine shoreline just before a storm breaks and finding it not threatening but clarifying.
