Tunk Mountains, Maine

John Marin was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, and raised in Weehawken by two maiden aunts after his mother's death. He studied mechanical engineering (he was briefly enrolled at the Stevens Institute of Technology) and pursued a career in architecture before entering the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1899 to study painting. There he took courses with Thomas Anshutz (1851 - 1912), among others. After a year at the Art Students League in New York, Marin left for Paris in 1905 and studied for a short time at the Académie Julian. During a five-year sojourn in France he produced an estimable body of works on paper, including pastels, watercolors, and etchings, Whistlerian in tone and promising in execution. These came to the attention of another young American in Paris, the painter and photographer Edward Steichen (1879 - 1973), who was functioning as something of an advance man for the New York gallery owner and photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864 - 1946). Such was Steichen's enthusiasm upon visiting Marin's Paris studio in 1909 that he sent a group of watercolors to New York to be included in a spring exhibition at Stieglitz's Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, known as "291" for the address on Fifth Avenue. Stieglitz himself paid a visit to Marin's Paris studio in June of that year and organized the first one-man show of Marin's work at his gallery the following February.