The Marin Family Collection

Trained as an architect in New Jersey, Marin demonstrated an early interest in the built environment that would inform his later pursuits as an artist. He created colorful and highly gestural seascapes, rural vistas, urban scenes, and abstract compositions. Although he worked in New York, New Mexico, and Europe, he eventually relocated to Maine, living in Small Point Harbor, Deer Isle, and Stonington before ultimately settling in Cape Split from the 1930s until his death.

The John Marin Collection represents nearly the entirety of the artist’s career and encompasses the many media he worked in. It includes six paintings, twenty-five drawings, thirty-three prints, and seven vintage photographs of Marin, including a platinum print by famed US photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz. This collection, which is among the few career collections of the artist’s oeuvre in an academic museum, was generously made via several donations by John Marin Jr. and Norma B. Marin. (Norma B. Marin also donated to the Colby Museum a significant collection of German Expressionist prints and modernist American and European photographs.)