Evening Storm, Schoodic, Maine No. 2

Though separated by several generations, Jervis McEntee and Marsden Hartley both employed emotive styles to express personal impressions of landscape rather than faithful transcripts of nature. In A Cliff in the Katskills (at left), McEntee rendered a well-known natural landmark in the Catskill Mountains with thickly applied daubs of paint, in a departure from the studious detail typical of mid-nineteenth- century landscape painting. The drama of McEntee’s painting, with its imposing boulder and foreboding clouds, is echoed in Marsden Hartley’s seascape. A Maine native, Hartley used an expressionist style of rough brushstrokes, bold outlines, and compressed space to depict the churning sea crashing against the rocky shore.