In her 2006 chapter on Marsden Hartley’s intense manly connection to Walt Whitman, Ruth L. Bohan noted that Hartley’s painting, Walt Whitman’s House, 328 Mickle Street, Camden, New Jersey, was on the frontispiece of Elizabeth Leavitt Keller’s 1921 memoir about caring for the poet in his last years.
Bohan may have only seen a stripped and rebound library copy, or she would have mentioned that the painting also appeared on the dust jacket of Walt Whitman In Mickle Street, over a tagline from Edna St. Vincent Millay: “There’s this little street and this little house.” The house is now a museum.
Whether of a person, a mountain, or a house, Hartley considered his paintings to be portraits. In Keller’s book the painting is dated 1908. Hartley mentioned the painting in one of the two incomplete autobiographical manuscripts he wrote in the later years of his life [1877-1943], which along with an earlier manuscript were published in edited form by Susan Elizabeth Ryan in 1996. He actually called it a “study,” mentioned its use only as a frontispiece for Keller’s book, said he’d just heard from sculptor Jo Davidson that he’d acquired it. Davidson’s portrait of Gertrude Stein is now in Bryant Park, and a cast of his portrait of a striding Walt Whitman was acquired by Philadelphia in 1957. You can see the statue in the center of the empty grass field you circle as you get on the highway to the Walt Whitman Bridge from the direction of Skinny Joey’s Cheesesteaks.
Hartley pegged the 1908 date and the trip from Philadelphia to Camden to the English language debut of Yiddish opera star Bertha Kalich. But that was actually in 1905. Which, coincidentally, coincides with the more extensive Whitmanic explorations of brotherly love that Bohan fleshed out in Hartley’s timeline, and with the c. 1905 date given to the painting in the digital catalogue raisonné recently published by the Marsden Hartley Legacy Project at Bates College.
It is via the MHLP that I learned there is another. Or was. Whitman bought the Mickle Street house in 1883, and lived there until his death in 1892. For eleven years before that Whitman lived with his brother George in a brick townhouse at 431 Stevens Street. Hartley also painted a portrait of this house. The painting is “documented,” says the MHLP, but no information is known of it, and it is “presumed lost or destroyed.”
For the painting’s existence, Bohan cites “Somehow A Past,” the title Hartley gave his various autobiographical manuscripts, and that “Hartley intimated that his attraction to the Stevens Street residence was centered on its being the site of Whitman’s [1882] meeting[s] with [Oscar] Wilde.” Which seems highly interesting. But somehow Wilde isn’t even mentioned in the published version of “Somehow A Past.” Turns out Bohan cites the original manuscript, at Yale, which is over 200 handwritten pages, and I just went through about half of it, and found the parts Ryan included, but not the references Bohan makes about another painting, another house, or Wilde. If AI really wants a job, let it transcribe 100-yo handwriting while I do anything else.
Meanwhile, before I contact Bohan over a 20-yo footnote, I feel freer than the MHLP to speculate about this lost Hartley Portrait of Whitman’s House. Would Hartley really have brought panels of different sizes to make his paintings? Is the CR number of Pt-0973 evidence of its late inclusion in a body of work with 960 paintings? Proud Music of A Storm, a c.1908 painting included in Hartley’s first show at 291 Gallery, the only painting Hartley titled with a Whitman poem, which is discussed at length in Bohan’s chapter on the artist’s Whitmanically homosocial landscapes, and also lost, though only listed as “unlocated,” is number Pt-0974. Can we luxuriate in the data-rich treasures of the MHLP, and also ask for a filter of lost or destroyed works?