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Marin was educated at Hoboken Academy and Stevens Prep. He was sketching at 14 and painting sensitive watercolors at 15. His family influenced him to attend Stevens Insitute to become an architect. He opened an office in 1893 but abandoned it to sketch and paint watercolors on his own. Marin studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts with Thomas Anshutz from 1899 to 1901, but missed classes to sketch the city. From 1901 to 1903, he attended the Art Students League in New York City under DuMond, then worked as a free-lance architect while trying to resolve his light pattern technique by painting 100 9x12” canvases in oils of the North River, the Palisades, and Manhattan. In 1905, his family sent him to Europe where he studied etching. When he returned in 1909, he had his first one-man exhibition at Steiglitz’s “291” gallery. From that point he maintained his long span as the dean of American watercolor, the master of capturing the fluidity of motion and of the simplifications of nature into semiabstract compositions.
Marin visited Taos the summers of 1929 and 1930 when he was almost 60. The first exhibition of his Western watercolors was an event in 1936 at the Museum of Modern Art. His friends even identified his sites by means of a map that showed his haunts. Actually, he had painted about 100 New Mexico watercolors without any effect on him that would compare to the impact of the West on Hartley. Marin’s Taos landscapes did not capture him, as did Maine. His Indians dancing were technically adept but not penetrating. More important to New Mexico art than Marin’s watercolors, however, was his influence. Along with Dasburg, he made modernism acceptable in this part of the Victorian West.
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