The fact that it was not possible during his lifetime nor has it been since, to place Martin neatly and easily into a category or school of painters is testimony of both his uniqueness and assimilative powers of all that was going on around him. Born in 1870 in Rutherford, New Jersey, Marin's formative years were precarious ones when a young painter in America could easily have fallen to the fashionable academic work of the day, or been swallowed up in the ferment of movements abroad. Marin remained himself even though in the 90's he studied in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and in Paris in 1904.

It has been said that Marin had an "instinct for frontiers". This suggests that he instinctively flt the pulse of the  modern movements abroad; it also suggests that his Yankee spirit was not to be dominated. These are the two characteristics of his work: He synthesized the main currents of modern art while evading the label of expressionist, cubist and the like, and he did it as an American born and bred.

Two subjects captivated him during his long career, the sea and the city. About the city Marin has said, "I see great forcces at work; great movements; the large buildings and the small buildings; the warring of the great and small; influences of one mass on another greater or smaller mass. Feelings are aroused which give me the desire to express the reaction of these pull forces, those influences which play with one another; great masses pulling smaller masses, each subject in some degree to the other's power." 

"Mid-Manhattan #1", 1932 is one of the rare oils of the city by Marin. The forces of which he spoke playing upon one another make it one of his finest works. Source: Bulletin, My 1961.