Although best known for his urban images, Dickinson did paint landscapes, and in the late 1910s he began a series of watercolors and drawings of houses and mountains that was inspired by paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire by Paul Cézanne (1839-1906). In these paintings Dickinson presented the buildings and terrain as a series of angular planes compressed in space. Maine Landscape is not as cubist as his other landscapes. The artist seems to have reveled in the circular movement of the tree form. His vigorous handling of the tree is carried through the entire painting, with thick strokes applied in an almost explosive manner. While perhaps revealing the early influence of Chase, the brushwork and vibrant, nonrepresentational color are indebted to fauvism. Indeed, these Cézannesque landscapes are the most expressive Dickinson ever painted.
Dickinson rarely titled or dated his paintings, and the titles and dates that were established by his dealers Charles Daniel and Edith Halpert have been questioned by the art historians Ruth Cloudman and Richard Rubenfeld. Maine Landscape entered the museum’s collection in 1935 with a "circa 1929" dating but later was given a date of about 1927. Rubenfeld dates Dickinson’s Cézannnesque landscapes as early as 1916 and Cloudman slightly later, 1919, both suggesting that his less radically modernist works were painted shortly after his first stay in Paris. While Dickinson is known to have visited Maine for a month in 1926, he traveled extensively and may have been in the area earlier. Moreover, the identification of the locale as Maine may not be accurate, since many of the paintings were given titles by dealers. Stylistically similar landscapes were purchased by Ferdinand Howald in October 1917 and January 1921, so Maine Landscape probably dates from the period 1917-21.
