Marin’s Bio

  • American photographer John Marin was born December 23rd, 1870 in Rutherford, New Jersey. However, Marin was raised in Weehawken by his grandparents after his mother died nine days after giving birth.
  • He began sketching at a young age and especially loved sketching nature, such as the Catskills or White Lake in New York, or even Wisconsin and Minnesota.
  • After 1893, for the next 11 years, Marin practiced as an architect after studying at Stevens Institute in Hoboken, NJ until deciding to become a professional artist at the age of 28-years old.
  • He studied art at both the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, PA from 1899 to 1901 and the Art Students League in New York. Most of the art he was producing around this time was similiar to those of the late Impressionists.
  • Around the age of 35, he sailed for Paris and spent the next five years wandering Europe practicing his art. He later called this period as a time when he “. . . played some billiards, incidentally knocked out some batches of etchings.”
  • While in Paris during his time in Europe, he met photographer Alfred Stieglitz, the man who was to give him his true beginnings of fame in the art-world.
  • Stieglitz premiered Marin at his gallery 291 in February 1910. This was around the time period that Marin began making Modernist artwork.
  • Marin continued to paint landscapes of both city and country, especially again of country, like he did in his youth, after spending his first summer in Maine in 1914. These summers in Maine continued on for the rest of his life, producing many, many works influenced strongly by the sea, weather and the rocky coast of this countryside.
  • During the 1920s, Marin’s style seemed to change by becoming more Expressionistic and abbreviated.
  • Marin continued to paint country and city landscapes until he died on October 2nd, 1953, just shy of his 83rd birthday.

“He was born old,” critic Henry McBride once wrote of Marin, “and has remained young.”

Works Cited
Mike Borghi Fine Art Inc. – American Art -John Marin
Wikipedia entry on John Marin
John Marin in the MOMA Collection


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