Scholarship has debated the dating of all the works from the Weehawken sequence: their formal and chromatic sophistication is startling given their early date. The academic community has nonetheless reached consensus that all of the works from this series were executed very early in Marin’s career, between roughly 1910 and 1916. Their full mastery of post-impressionist color and their prescient application of painterly gesture help place them as some of the earliest examples of advanced abstraction in America. Marin would have been first to point out that each work was drawn from life and maintains a tether to the practice of observation, but the daring with which they are executed pushes them far beyond Marin’s contemporaries. Marin, in his lifetime, held the admiration of Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock, and these works have been called “proto-Guston” [Klaus Kertess, John Marin: The Weehawken Sequence (2011), p. 5] and “possibly the first American artist to make abstract paintings” [Roberta Smith, “John Marin: The Weehawken Sequence,” The New York Times, Feb. 17, 2001]. That all of these remarks are cogent while the works are also so beautiful has befuddled historians for a century. Rarely has an innovation so bold been so successful.

Marin would have been exposed to the Fauves during his 1905 trip to Paris, and while we do not have a record of a particular thread of influence, the stamp of André Derain and Henri Matisse is all over Marin’s early oils in the following decade. The palette shared by the French Post-Impressionists is on full display, as is Matisse’s innovative use of incising into thick impasto with the back of the brush. The series is painted with brilliant abandon, yet recognizable imagery remains visible. Indeed, Marin painted outdoors exclusively—the small size of the canvas panels of the series is a vestige of the plein air practice. Marin would keep to restrained scale even into the 1950s, in part working under the shadow of the great success of these early works. His vocabulary of gestures would change over the years, refining a group of riffs and forms into a signature style. But in the early years of the 1910s, Marin tried everything.

These germinal laboratories are not only some of the most advanced paintings made in America before World War I, they also circumscribe the territory of modernism within which Marin would spend the rest of his life on expedition.

The present work is an extraordinary standout from this series. Painted at the culmination of his years in Weehawken, it is significantly larger than many of the other Weehawken pictures, a grand summa of the vocabulary of form and color he had developed there. With this picture and the very few that may have followed it, Marin broke with oil painting for a time. He would return to the medium in two other discrete periods—in the 1930s, and again in the 1950s—but the interim was focused almost entirely on watercolor. A voracious innovator, Marin may have felt that he had said all he'd needed to say on the matter before moving on to new media. The present work supports this idea: not only does it seem to contain all the fauvist influences—the broken lines and bright colors -- of his first period of work, but it hints at the developments that are yet to come. The stair-step treatment of the foreground and the almost architectonic treatment of the sky manifest here would continue to appear in his work in the following decades. The variety of paint quality, from thickly-daubed to highly dilute—would also keep the painter busy in all his media. River Scene from Weehawken shines a light over the rest of Marin's career, a seminal work whose lessons he would unpack for decade.