Marsden Hartley, Walt Whitman’s Houses

Walt Whitman in Mickle Street, 1921, 1st ed. with “Walt Whitman’s House [1908] (sic)” on the cover/dj, now on its way to my house. 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. Marsden Hartley, Walt Whitman’s House [PT-0091], c. 1905, oil on board, 9 1/2 x 5 1/2 in., private collection as published by the Marsden Hartley Legacy Project Whether of a person, a mountain, or a house, Hartley considered his paintings to be portraits. In Keller’s…