About this work
The research has given me strong, verifiable grounding. The title "Self Portrait By Marsden Hartley" almost certainly refers to *Sustained Comedy* (1939), held at the Carnegie Museum of Art — the only known self-portrait Hartley ever painted in oil, and the one universally referred to as his "self-portrait." The conte crayon *Self-Portrait as a Draughtsman* (c. 1908) is the only other candidate, but that is a drawing on paper, not a painting. The product listing says "Self Portrait By Marsden Hartley," which aligns with *Sustained Comedy*, the sole painted self-portrait. I have enough documented detail to write a grounded, specific description.
The figure confronts you head-on: a broad-shouldered young man in a white tank top, his ruddy flesh mapped with tattoos — roses, butterflies, a nest cradling a mother bird and two chicks, and flowing roots that trail down one arm in vivid red. *Sustained Comedy* is a bust-length image of a muscular young blond sailor in a tank top, his arms, chest, and neck abundantly decorated with tattoos including a rose, a butterfly, a naked woman, a star, a heart pierced by an arrow, and a sailboat with clouds.
On the tee-shirt, what looks like a window opens onto a background painted in the same color as the figure's ruddy skin — within it stands a curious image that some scholars have likened to Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man.
The figure sports a round golden earring, and his eyes are circled in red in a manner resembling Native American war paint or a face mask. The palette is warm and insistent — ochre flesh, white cotton, flashes of scarlet and cobalt — and the composition has the same blunt, frontal gravity Hartley gave to his late Maine portraits. Everything presses forward.
*Sustained Comedy — Portrait of an Object* is oil on board, painted in 1939, and is held in the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.
Hartley's dealer, Hudson Walker, revealed that this is in fact a self-portrait — the only one he ever painted. The artist is masking his true identity, offering an idealized likeness instead: by then, Hartley was 62 years old, and this buff young man is distinctly different from the man who was described as "the gaunt eagle from the hills of Maine."
In 1937 Hartley had returned to his native Maine, where he used a vocabulary of simplified forms and deep, rich color to portray what he viewed as the state's solemn grandeur and began to experiment with figuration in a series of iconic, frontal portraits. *Sustained Comedy* stands apart from all of them — a coded act of self-invention, its humor as dark as it is tender. It is, at its core, a self-portrait embodying several emblems and symbols in exploration of his artistic identity. In a career built on symbolic portraiture — from the military emblems of the Berlin paintings to
