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oil on canvas Painted in 1913. Gail Scott writes: "By January 1913, Marsden Hartley had been in Europe for less than a year, but it was the most intense and stimulating period of his early career. Painting No. 6, a semi-abstract work comprised of fluid, color-washed shapes outlined in black, belongs to a sequence of works created during that pivotal time. This canvas, and others in the series, like Painting No. 1 (figure 1, 1913, oil on canvas, 39 3/4 by 31 7/8 in., Sheldon Memorial Museum, Lincoln, Nebraska), represent a coming together of Hartley's artistic vision?his youthful explorations of the mystical and deeper dimensions of consciousness?with the stylistic and formal innovations of modernism that he had been absorbing since his arrival in Europe in April, 1912. Today they are considered watershed paintings in Hartley's career. "Like other American artists before and after him, Hartley had enthusiastically immersed himself in the Paris art world, discovering first hand the genius of Picasso, Cézanne, Rousseau, Renoir and the primitive collections in the Musée de Trocadero. Throughout 1912, Hartley took in everything he saw and reflected much of it back in a number of still life paintings with clear echoes of Cézanne's tilted still lifes or Picasso's analytic cubism. What he particularly admired about Picasso (and found lacking in other Cubist painters) was a faithfulness to the intuitive processes. '. . . What I see in his work,' he told Stieglitz, 'is a pure rendering of thought forms as they present themselves to him & with them he creates a consistent harmony.'(1) By late 1912, however, and inspired by Picasso, Hartley 'stopped doing beans and apples,(2)' as he stated wryly in his autobiography and was ready to turn in a new direction. He saw, as he later explained to Alfred Stieglitz, '. . . this great necessity in painting, of leaving objective things?and after a summer of still life I found myself going into the subjective studying Picasso closely find