Mills and Footbridge, Meaux
<p>Marin made repeated trips to Meaux, an old mill town 25 miles northeast of Paris. Here dabs of diluted pink, red, and yellow suggest the movement of clouds, figures, and wind. Marin painted the sky with long, dry brushstrokes, then defined the clouds, working wet-into-wet by dripping in dilute washes of color that dispersed the pigment and yielded dark, feathered lines. After the washes dried, he punctuated the remaining white of the sky with yellow marks to add brightness. Demonstrating an intuitive understanding of how watercolor behaves, as well as a willingness to experiment with unpredictable results, Marin found such manipulations liberating. This was among the 25 watercolors shown at Stieglitz’s 291 in the spring of 1909, the first time the gallery owner exhibited Marin’s work.</p>
Catalogue
- Year
- 1908
- Dimensions
- 28.3 × 39.1 cm (11 3/16 × 15 7/16 in.)
- Collection
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Artist
- John Marin
Artist
Painting
John Marin was an American modernist painter and printmaker known for his dynamic watercolors and etchings of coastal landscapes, particularly Maine. Working primarily in watercolor from the 1910s onward, he developed a fractured, energetic visual language that synthesized Cubist fragmentation with direct observation of nature. His gestural brushwork and bold use of paper's white ground anticipated Abstract Expressionism while maintaining a strong sense of place and atmospheric condition. Marin spent decades based in Maine, where the rocky coastlines and maritime environment became the primary subject of his mature work.
Full artist profile →More
More by John Marin
Approaching Fog
1952 · Watercolor with blotting, wiping and traces of scraping, and with brush and black ink, graphite, fabricated charcoal, and touches of opaque watercolor on medium-weight, rough-textured, off-white wove paper (four edges trimmed)
Movement: Boats and Objects, Blue Gray Sea
1947 · Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Bridge - on the Bridge, No. 2
1944 · Etching
Cape Split, Maine
1941 · Watercolor with touches of blotting, and with graphite and black colored pencil, on lightweight (estimated), slightly textured, ivory wove paper (top, left and right edges trimmed), laid down on artists’ board faced with ivory wove paper, in original frame
Circus Elephants
1941 · Watercolor with scraping and wiping, and with opaque watercolor, graphite and black crayon, on medium-weight, slightly textured, cream laid paper
Movement: Sky and Grey Sea
1941 · Watercolor, charcoal, and pencil on paper
Record
Verified by WattsOS- Artist
- John Marin
- Year
- 1908
- Dimensions
- 28.3 × 39.1 cm (11 3/16 × 15 7/16 in.)
- Watts ID
- WW-1908-136334
Source
- Collection
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Source
- aic
- Reference
- View at source
- Status
- verified