The John Marin Collection at the Colby College Museum of Art The Colby College Museum of Art (2003)

The John Marin Collection at the Colby College Museum of Art showcases the 61 Marin drawings, paintings, watercolors, etchings and photographs in the museum's collection. The works in this beautifully produced 167-page hardcover volume range in time from the 1888 watercolor White Lake, Sullivan County, N.Y., done when Marin was 18, to Huntington, Long Island #2, completed the year before his death in 1953.

An early modernist painter, Marin is best known for his watercolors of the urban landscape of New York and the landscape of rural Maine, where Marin spent almost every summer between 1914 and 1953. Among his watercolors are two celebrations of Stonington, Maine. Deer Isle and Blue Sea, Red Sky, Ledges, Cape Split, Maine record his piercing impressions of the vast vistas and sparkling, restless waters of the Maine coast.

Before Marin discovered inspiration in Maine, he spent five years in Europe. Some of his etchings from 1905 to 1910-notably Notre Dame, Paris and La Madeleine, Paris-are copiously detailed and realistic. A pair of etchings done a few years later, Grain Elevators, Abstraction and Street Scene, Abstraction, are spare and mysterious even with the titles supplied.

The John Marin Collection, published on the 50th anniversary year of Marin's death, leads off with a foreword by Hugh Gourley, emeritus director of the Colby College Museum of Art, and a comprehensive essay on Marin's work by Ruth E. Fine of the National Gallery of Art. Copies of the book are available at the museum gift shop and at the Colby bookstore.