American Art Collaborative

Its orange hues blending heavily with browns, Late Fall, Maine captures the fleeting moment between the chromatic brilliance of high fall and the soon-to-be-bare limbs of winter. Hartley’s depiction of the waning harvest season echoes the diminishing social and economic status of the region around Lovell, Maine where he was working at the time. There, Hartley joined a tradition of artists dating back to the early nineteenth century, who painted the White Mountains straddling New Hampshire and western Maine. By the first decade of the twentieth century, however, the area’s status as an artist’s destination and its major tourism industry were both in decline, having been eclipsed by regions elsewhere in the United States and abroad.