American painter and poet Marsden Hartley was BOTD in 1877. Born in Lewiston, Maine, he studied at the Cleveland School of Art before moving to New York to continue his studies. His early work impressed art impresario Alfred Stieglitz, who offered him a solo exhibition in 1909. Hartley moved to Paris in 1912, socialising with Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso and fellow gay expatriate Hart Crane. He relocated to Berlin, where he befriended Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc and fell in love with Karl von Freyburg, a lieutenant in the German army. Freyburg’s death during World War One devastated Hartley, who depicted their relationship in his 1914 abstract Portrait of a German Officer. He lived between America and Europe for the next twenty years, returning permanently to the United States in 1937 with the intention of becoming “the painter of Maine”. His later work reflected his increased acceptance of his homosexuality, shifting from abstraction to figurative portraits of his friends and lovers in various states of muscular undress. He also wrote and published poems, essays and stories, many of which referenced his erotic attachments to men. He died in 1943, aged 66.