Landscape No. 5 is an expressionistic depiction of the American Southwest. It does not represent a specific location, but rather a combination of typical southwestern geographic features. A river runs through a canyon with mountains visible in the background. The scene has been stripped of any identifying details or evidence of human presence. The subdued palette consists of five colors: predominantly black, white, and green, enlivened by red and yellow. The emphasis on geometric forms, two-dimensionality, and the organic, if rather muted, colors recalls the work of Paul Cézanne, an artist that Marsden Hartley greatly admired.

Though the scene has a somewhat bleak air, the artist was quite enthusiastic about his subject. From June 1918 to November 1919 Hartley lived in Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico, and he was enthralled by the southwestern landscape. He wrote that “any of these beautiful arroyos and canyons is a living example of the splendor of the ages . . . and I am bewitched with their magnificence and their austerity.” He completed a number of pastel and oil sketches of the landscape there, and larger oil paintings after he returned to New York. After relocating to Berlin, in 1923 Hartley commenced working on a group of approximately 35 southwestern landscapes that he described in a letter to his friend and fellow artist Alfred Stieglitz as “New Mexican landscape recollections.” Landscape No. 5 is an early example from this group. Though scholars have attributed Hartley’s desolate depictions of the southwestern landscape to his state of psychological unrest and isolation in Berlin, in his letter to Stieglitz he described them as “a certain coming toward repose” with “no intervention of private states of personal existence.”