John Marin

John Marin (1870-1953), American painter, who is generally regarded as the foremost American watercolorist of his time. He was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1899 to 1901. In 1905 he went abroad for four years, studying in Paris and making trips to Rome, London, and Amsterdam. During this period, he painted in oils and watercolors and also etched. In 1909 he held his first show of watercolors at “291,” the New York City gallery owned by the American photographer Alfred Steiglitz. Marin made his most important contribution in the medium of watercolor by using a method of bracketing and subdividing his pictures into a series of semicubist planes and bold clashes of color. He is best known for his prolific series of Maine seascapes, such as Maine Islands (1922, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.). His other principal subjects are city buildings as, for example, Lower Manhattan from the River no. 1 (1921, Metropolitan Museum, New York City), and landscapes.