In 1918 Marsden
Hartley joined the budding artists’ colony in Taos, New Mexico. Over the
following year he created a series of drawings in pastel, a chalky crayon he
found was ideally suited to the arid terrain. He wrote his friend and mentor
Alfred Stieglitz: “It is the only way I can get a line on the qualities [of New
Mexico]. It is a very important and typical medium for this country which has
such wonderful dry quality of color, and such hardness and brilliance.”