Buildings, One with Tower

Here Marin positioned himself looking south on Broadway toward Saint Paul’s Chapel and the Singer Building. He abandoned his earlier staccato, dotted application of color; instead, he chose a paper of heavier weight and texture and used more water, forsaking any preliminary graphite guide and allowing his washes to bleed into one another as in the Tyrol watercolors painted in the summer of 1910. Marin’s encounters with modern New York were intensified by his discussions about art with Stieglitz at 291. There he became acquainted not only with Stieglitz’s atmospheric photographs, but also with those of Edward Steichen and others in their circle whose emotive pictures of clouds, rain, snow, and steam encouraged him to pay attention to observation under different environmental conditions, as explored in this sheet.