American Art Collaborative

Between 1888 and 1905, John Marin worked almost exclusively in watercolor. It was his growing reputation in this medium that diverted recognition from the paintings he produced intermittently until the 1930s. The Weehawken Sequence, approximately 100 oil sketches on canvasboard, depicts the industrial waterfront of his New Jersey hometown and constitutes Marin’s most undervalued but feverish experimentation. For decades these oils were misdated, but on the strength of their mature synthesis of Post-Impressionist color and technique, they are now firmly assigned to the period immediately following the artist’s years in Europe.