One of a group of artists promoted by Alfred Stieglitz, John Marin was a central figure in the New York avant-garde who sought to capture a distinctly “American” sense of place, using a Fauvist palette and Cubist fracturing of planes in his interpretation of the New England landscape.

This painting was inspired by a remote point of land east of Mount Desert Island, Maine, which Marin first visited in 1933. The following year, he purchased an oceanside summer home on the island. The dramatic Maine coastline, with its craggy rocks, stormy seas and evergreen forests, is condensed into a series of shifting Cubist planes, rendered with various thicknesses of paint. The diamond and zigzag shapes may have been inspired by the Native American crafts that he admired in the home of famed New Mexican arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan, who hosted the painter during his 1929 stay in Taos.