Deer Isle, Maine, probably Movement No. 12—Boats and Pertaining Thereto

John Marins Deer Isle, Maine from 1927 is a watercolor with black pencil that exemplifies the artists mature approach to the Maine coastline, his most important subject and the landscape that inspired his most radical compositions. Marin, who spent his summers in Maine from 1914 onward, developed a style of watercolor painting in which the landscape is broken into a network of diagonal lines, angular shapes, and calligraphic marks that simultaneously describe the scene and assert the autonomy of the painted surface. The title Movement No. 12 - Boats and Pertaining Thereto suggests that Marin conceived of his Maine paintings as parts of a series of variations on a theme, like a musical composition in which the same motifs are stated, developed, and recapitulated across multiple movements. The boats and their surroundings are rendered in a vocabulary of broken lines and overlapping planes that dissolve the distinction between the natural and the constructed, the solid and the liquid, creating a visual field in which all elements participate in the same rhythmic structure. The year 1927 places this watercolor in the period of Marins most accomplished work in the medium, when his reputation as Americas foremost watercolorist was firmly established and his influence on the younger generation of American modernists was at its peak.

Marins Maine watercolors are among the most important works in the history of American watercolor painting, demonstrating that the medium could accommodate the same formal ambition and structural complexity as oil painting. His influence on American modernism extended through the Abstract Expressionists who recognized in his work a precedent for the integration of gesture and structure.

A 1927 watercolor by Marin of Deer Isle, Maine depicting boats in a vocabulary of broken lines and overlapping planes, conceived as a movement in a series of compositional variations on the Maine coastline.