About this work
Animated, surging energies possess the trees and meadow in this midsummer scene, while a mountain absorbs cast shadows from clouds that appear to rival its monumental solidity. The canvas is organized with a square format — as opposed to rectilinear — with horizontal zones that stack the composition and heighten effects of spatial compression.
The paint is thickly applied to the surface of the painting, but the brush strokes are small — a dense, shimmering field of interlocked marks that gives every patch of hillside and sky a trembling, almost alive quality. The work is proto-Fauve in its assertive use of unexpected colors , pushing the greens and golds of a Maine July into territory that feels more felt than observed.
Hartley painted *Silence of High Noon* after returning to his native Maine in mid-May 1908, staying in North Lovell in the Stoneham Valley near Kezar Lake — an area that had attracted him since 1902.
In the Stoneham Valley, he painted the landscape using his so-called "Segantini-stitch" brushstrokes, inspired by the Italian painter Giovanni Segantini.
Hartley adopted this stitchlike brushstroke after seeing color reproductions of Segantini's paintings in a German magazine — an early instance of the Continental influences he would absorb and transform throughout his career. The work was exhibited alongside sixteen others at the Daniel Gallery under the title *Paintings by Marsden Hartley: The Mountain Series*, and in it Hartley rendered the clouds as the "pleasing forms" described by Emerson in his essay *Spiritual Laws* — a text Hartley frequently read.
Hartley debuted this painting in 1909 at his first solo exhibition at Alfred Stieglitz's gallery, 291 , where it announced a fully formed artistic voice before he had even set foot in Europe.
This is a painting that earns a wall with strong, natural light — morning sun that will catch its ridged surface and make the individual strokes spark. For Hartley, nature was religion, and these early landscapes reveal what he described as "little visions of the great intangible." That spiritual charge is still legible here: the stillness of a summer noon held in perpetual suspension, the kind of quiet that feels like the world pausing to listen. It speaks to the viewer drawn to landscape not as decoration but as a record of encounter — someone who wants art that carries weather, place, and a particular hour of summer light that cannot quite be named.
