John Marin's early watercolors provide a clear bridge from nineteenth-century aestheticsm to twentieth-century modernism. Marin spent four years in Europe, from 1905 to 1910, during which time his metamorphosis progressed rapidly. He left America a maker of etchings in the stamp of James Abbott McNeill Whistler and returned a watercolorist in a modernist vein all his own. Ruth Fine posits that "Marin might have known Whistler's work, and specifically his etchings, from exhibitions held in New York from the 1880s. He also might have seen them in the Pennsylvania Academy's own collection, access to which was cited as one of the benefits of holding a student ticket [Fine, John Marin (1990), p. 32]. "Whistler's etchings might have inspired Marin's use of a centrally focused, vignetted image; his delight in the decorated facades; his evocative rather than descriptive linework" [Ibid., p. 36].

In the catalogue for a 2015 exhibition surveying the advent of American modernism, Nannette Macijunes described the present work:

Marin perfected his handling of the broad washes and lucid hues of the medium during the teens in lyric works such as Downtown from the River, in which his Whistlerian roots still linger. During the twenties, he moved steadily and irrevocably away from such luminous effects, extending the range of expression that could be achieved by building up opaque strokes of saturated color, which he would then mix with graphite, colored pencils, charcoal and chalk [Nanette V. Maciejunes, What it Meant to be Modern, 1910 - 1965, 2016, pp. 11].

Downtown from the River indeed bears the silvery tonality of a Whistlerian nocturne, albeit refracted through the lens of a newly-minted modernist. The vertical stretches of lower Manhattan's skyline, growing before Marin's eyes, are presented as a central mass. The waterline underscores a horizontal much as Marin employed in his etchings of Notre Dame. The watercolor also looks toward the future as well: emanating from the central tower--possibly the Singer Building, then the tallest in lower Manhattan--lines of energy radiate, hinting at the vigorous abstract elements Marin would introduce in the coming years.

The palette, too, looks ahead to Marin's "Weehawken Sequence" of oils. The present work was completed at the very beginning of this important contribution -- arguably the first abstract painting in America. It shares the cool "full-spectrum" palette with the bulk of the sequence, evincing a cunning fusion visual ideas new and old amid the playful, energetic application.