As you pull into the harbor of Corea, a small village in the tiny town of Gouldsboro, Maine, you can smell, from the spray of the Atlantic, the same brine that emanates from Marsden Hartley's Lobster Fishermen, which the artist composed there, in a church studio.

If you've ever gone lobstering, you know the distinctive, pungent, briny smell that permeates the lobster houses on the docks, the coldness of the water as you lift up a cage with a bulbous-eyed crustacean staring at you from inside. Fifty years earlier, non-native residents of Corea called the town Indian Harbor, after the few thousand Passamaquoddy people who've been catching lobsters since time immemorial in that place. 

In the lobster fishermen, Hartley saw authentic representations of the rugged environment. He wrote, "The man around the rocks looks so very like the profiles one sees in the rocks themselves. They have absorbed the energy of the dramatic elements they cope with, and you may be sure that life around the sea in New England is no easy existence; and they give out the same salty equivalent in human association."

At the time, people didn't often publicly discuss the element of Hartley's sexual desire in these works, as in the World War I-era paintings he'd done in Germany. It's all encoded, of course, in the way the Paul Bunyan-esque lobsterman on the left stands, for example, and Hartley's biography is the key to crack the code. Although this work is from eighty years ago, the tall lobsterman's pose and outfit makes him look like somebody walking around town today. His outfit was a functional part of the fisherman's life, but more recently it's become an urban fashion statement. 

Hartley knew how to associate with other artists who always felt out of place, like Berenice Abbott and Gertrude Stein, who wrote, "in some ways he has managed to keep your attention freshened and as you look you keep on being freshened." The nonagenarian living legend Ashley Bryan, a prominent disciple of the great Langston Hughes, also chose a Maine lobstering village, Little Cranberry Island, as a refuge for making visual art.

Hartley did a pastel-on-paperboard study for this work, also in the Met collection. Lobster Fishermen is a famous member of Hartley's Maine Series, which he composed over the course of several decades. It was painted toward the end of his life, when he had finally settled in his home state after sojourns across Europe and the United States and declared that he wanted to be "The Painter of Maine."  The artist David Salle notes that Hartley's color range is quite specific, "but with the palette he does have, he's all in." The all-in-ness of Hartley's expressions keep them growing in value and popularity a century later.