It was 1920 when the great American painter Marsden Hartley first arrived at Dogtown, a rugged tract of boulders and shrubs in Cape Ann’s central uplands in Massachusetts. He called it “a weird stretch of landscape… almost hostile to the common eye.” Ten years later, he returned and made two series of paintings which are now on view at the Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester.
A poet, too, Hartley wrote “Beethoven (in Dogtown)” which is inscribed on the reverse of the painting “Flaming Pool, Dogtown 1931.” Of his kind of idyll he writes: “So much more wonderful this way/than summer in a trance/of chlorophyll or other circumstances.” http://myweb.
