George Lovett Kingsland Morris (1905-1975)

In Pieces of Glass: An Artoir, John Sacret Young tells how he acquired this painting as the second, after a small Marin, in his nascent collection. He thought, “The name of the painting set into play an organizing principle. The mullions of a window and rough semi-abstract rungs and railing of a balcony outside.” It reminded him of Cézanne’s late “spare and eloquent” watercolors. Learning it was an anomaly among Morris’s larger oils, he wrote to the artist, who answered the letter writing “he had just married Suzy Frelinghuysen and while honeymooning in New York City he had journeyed out to New Jersey to meet John Marin for lunch” and afterwards looked at his recent watercolors. “Marin talked to Morris about how fundamentally important it was to have an ‘understanding of accidentals’,” which resonated so intensely that Morris painted this view from the Carlyle Hotel window where he and Suzy were staying.