West Shore Docks, Weehawken, New Jersey

Upon his return to Weekawken in 1910, Marin created a work in which he handled watercolor in the fluid, flooded manner of his Tyrolean landscapes. Like those mountain scenes, this watercolor was constructed in horizontal bands, with an expanse of paper left nearly empty in the middle ground, where the pale stains of wiped, blotted color evoke the dull glare of the river’s surface. This free wet-into-wet application appears in numerous other Weehawken images in which Marin allowed his colors to bleed into each other, giving the scenes of river commerce the soft glow of wintry dawn light. Here Marin’s vantage point high on the riverbank encouraged him to flatten the composition; the shapes of the Weehawken piers extend upward along the picture plane rather than leading the eye into deep space.