Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1910 (Heft 30))

men of the middle period, such as De Wint, Cotman, Cox, towards the most
brilliant among the moderns, and it is among these that we must class John
Marin, his technique and his temperament. While in England there is still a
tendency (in the nature of a refined reaction) to give the more accentuate
drawing in a water-color its right play, in the other men I have mentioned
drawing is interpreted in terms of color, and in the hands of such modern
French artists as Signac and Matisse glows and glows again as a mosaic of
the purest pattern. In either case these are the earlier and the later heights
which separate that dark gulf of awful and hopeless banality in which are sunk
the whole of those salmagundi potpourri of water-color drawing, painting or
hotch-potch, in which a texture that imitates “oils” or an interest that rivals
reality is more thought of than the simple delight of discovering by pencil
and brush the structural beauties of nature in the massing and modelling of
light and aerial and colored perspectives.
Mr. Marin is a poet and a visionary of the first order, a dreaming and
enchanted (sometimes a well-nigh intoxicated) lover of life, but—and therein
lies the secret of his special skill—with his hand ever firmly set upon the throb
and pulse of that which delights him: the warp and woof of color and the
dots and passages of motion in the rapturous lyric of all things under the sun.
It is a world of color that he sees, and often his colors speak to us through the
voice of a mist, blowing themselves into the air to acknowledge themselves.
In some of his studies it is as if he felt there to be only two elements in the
universe: sun and water, which, acting and reacting upon one another, drew
out of the earth all its forces and material objects, only to shed them upon us
again in lustres of returning light. Veil beyond veil, and mist beyond irides-
cent mist, rise these tearful images, transfiguring all things within their reach,
till heaven and earth, the sky, hills, lakes, the contours of all nature, seem com-
pounded into one measureless and exhaustless film. This is indeed to me such
“a stuff as dreams are made of”—the dreams of a wakeful and watchful spirit;
for never does he lose himself in shapes of mystic incoherency. His exquisite
eye is the nervous web on which all this weft of imageries is thrown. There
is the beauty of a great and enchanting mystery in almost all his work; but
always we feel the guidance of a bold and happy spirit leading us through the
maze of all this illimitable dreaming. It is because his “manner”is so simple.
It were easy to tell, even if we did not recognize, the landscape in which
the most of his scenes are laid. It has been well said of the French land-
scape that “mere topography, the simple material, counts for so little, and
all being so pure, untouched and tranquil in itself, mere light and shade
have such easy work in modulating it to one dominant tone.” For Mr. Marin
is not always figuring things to us even in the most luminous of mists. The
great variety of his interests is one of the astonishing properties of his powers.
Sometimes it is the clear, beaten air after rain that attracts him, and he has
stopped—all day it may be—on the hither side of some little valley, or on some
sunny orchard slope, we may imagine, to watch and note how the light of
clouds plays above and about some mountain village, with its shadowed ram-
parts, dreaming “under skies of dream.”

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