HOMER MARTIN 
 
 3 Y FRANK JEWETT MATHER, Jr. 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2013 
 
 http://archive.org/details/homermartinpoetiOOmath 
 
THE HARP OF THE WINDS 
 THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART 
 Signed and dated 1895, canvas, 28J inches high, 40 inches wide. 
 
HOMER MARTIN 
 
 POET IN LANDSCAPE 
 
 BY 
 
 Frank Jewett Mather, Jr. 
 
 New York 
 PRIVATELY PRINTED 
 
 MCMXII 
 
Copyright, 19 12 
 by 
 
 Frederic Fairchild Sherman 
 
PREFACE 
 
 MRS. MARTIN'S "Homer Martin: a Reminis* 
 cence" (New York: William Macbeth, 1904), 
 is so charmingly written and so adequate on the per= 
 sonal side that only weighty reasons can justify a return 
 to the theme. Such reasons are found in the increasing 
 interest in Homer Martin's work, in the lapse of years 
 that makes a critical estimate more possible, and in 
 the discovery of new biographical material. I have 
 depended much on the "Reminiscence," though, be* 
 ing written chiefly from memory, it contains a num* 
 ber of slips in chronology. Wherever this book is at 
 variance with it, documentary material justifies the 
 divergence. Without the generous aid of Martin's 
 surviving friends and the cooperation of owners of his 
 pictures, this book could not have been undertaken. 
 "W. C. Brownell, Montgomery Schuyler and Edward 
 Gay have kindly communicated indispensable recoh 
 lections and points of view. Messrs. Thomas B.Clarke 
 and John Du Fais of New York, and Dr. Montgomery 
 Mosher of Albany have lent me precious sheaves of 
 Martin's letters. Mr. William Macbeth put at my dis* 
 posal his large collection of sketches, which are about 
 the only evidence for the painter's artistic origins and 
 early movements; and contributed with unfailing 
 
obligingness muck information that could have been 
 got from no other source. My debt to other corre* 
 spondents and to the scanty literature on the subject 
 is expressed in these pages at the proper places. No 
 enumeration of the many collectors who have per? 
 mitted access to their homes and photographing of 
 their treasures can here be made. Every illustration 
 in the book and nearly every mention of a picture in 
 the text may be taken as a grateful recognition of 
 such a courtesy. 
 
 F.J. M., Jr. 
 
 Princeton, N.J. 
 April, 1 9 12 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 The Harp of the Winds .... Frontispiece 
 
 The Old Mill Page 16 
 
 Mount Jefferson and Mount Adams . . " 16 
 
 Lake Sanford 1,1 24 
 
 Spring Morning kk 32 
 
 Lake Champlain 1 ' 32 
 
 Andante : Fifth Symphony .... 11 40 
 
 The Mussel Gatherers 11 48 
 
 Sand Dunes, Lake Ontario .... 1 ' 48 
 
 Westchester Hills " 56 
 
 An Old Manor, Normandy .... 11 64 
 
 Honneur Light . 1 ' 64 
 
 Adirondack Scenery " 72 
 
 « 
 
HOMER MARTIN 
 
 PART ONE 
 
 HISTLER once introduced his friend 
 Homer Martin in these words: "Gens 
 tlemen, this is Homer Martin . He doesn't 
 look as if he were, hut he is." Martin's 
 doubtless adequate retort has not been 
 preserved, but the quip must have cut. Precisely this 
 not looking what he was was a lifelong disadvantage. 
 Careless and positively untidy in dress, eccentric in 
 gait, his face cruelly marred by a chronic eczema, 
 Homer Martin certainly did not look the sensitive 
 artist. His friend George Boughton used to say rather 
 cynically that he couldn't afford to have Homer about 
 the studio, so deterrent was his effect upon conven? 
 tionally minded British patrons. 
 
 Had Martin chosen to win these Philistines, he 
 need only have spoken. As to his talk there is only 
 one opinion. Golden, unexpected sayings flowed from. 
 him unfailingly. Wherever there was good talk he 
 was easily first. The best minds waited eagerly for his 
 utterance ; the servants at his club and the children of 
 his friends delighted in it. Inert or conventional peo* 
 pie, however, were often appalled by his flights. No 
 neutral attitude in his regard was possible. The best 
 masculine society New York offered was at his feet, 
 
 7 
 
and he cared little for any other. He loved a con vi vis 
 ality that permitted a fine Rabelaisianism. Constraint, 
 other than that of his own fastidious taste, was irk? 
 some to him. Thus, while his friends included the 
 foremost physicians, journalists and critics in New 
 York, among this elite he preferred men of essential 
 simplicity whose outlook upon reality was genial, 
 wide and fearless. 
 
 Such men still regard his friendship as a patent of 
 nobility. One and all they agree that his wit is income 
 municable, growing as it did out of the occasion. ""It 
 cannot be decanted" Montgomery Schuyler writes 
 me, and I recall Emerson's account of Thoreau's con- 
 versation as "a continual coining of the present mo* 
 ment." Yes, the best of Homer Martin — those '''cosy 
 studio and tavern times" lovingly hinted at in Elih u 
 Vedder's autobiography — is irrecoverable. But cer= 
 tain retorts have survived which faintly suggest the 
 sudden flash from the blue. To a patron urgent for 
 a "poetic" title for a lovely wood interior Martin 
 grunted, "Oh! it's the Home of the Telegraph Pole." 
 Once when asked how he liked a new ceiling design 
 in his club — a pattern, as he saw, of wriggling inepti* 
 tude — he affected a dazed expression and, parodying a 
 popular refrain, hummed, "Wait till the ceiling rolls 
 by." A whole architectural criticism might be woven 
 about that text. A friend asked him to paint something 
 on the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven, and the response 
 was, ' * Paint God ? " But Martin did one of his serenest 
 masterpieces with the piano partition of the great an* 
 
 8 
 
dante sounding in his ears. Oneof his dicta has become 
 classic, at least among the large and respectable public 
 of beer lovers. A lady, alluding to Kis well-known 
 foible, asked if be didn't drink too mucb beer. "Mas 
 dame, tbere is not too mucb beer "was bis monumental 
 rejoinder. Worthy also of proverbial currency is his 
 pathetic explanation of a ruinous sale to a mean buyer 
 — "He had me by the slack of the belly." This was a 
 hold that adversity had not infrequently upon Homer 
 Martin. Generally his wit, a true product of corns 
 panionship, was instinct with good nature, but it could 
 cut as well. Standing in front of the Tenth Street 
 Studios, where he worked for about seventeen years, 
 he was asked what a neighboring big building was. 
 "Its a half orphan asylum" was the answer," and 
 this," turning back to the studios, "is a half artist 
 asylum." 
 
 The wit that made him the center of a choice circle 
 isolated him from his fellow artists. Except for a few 
 like the taciturn Winslow Homer and the manyssided 
 La Farge, he cared little for their company, and they 
 cared as little for his work. Aside from his members 
 ship in our three chief exhibiting societies, I cannot 
 find that Homer Martin ever received any prize or 
 similar honor from the craft he adorned. His fellows 
 hardly knew how to take him. His fastidious spirit 
 was as alien to the random Bohemianism of the sevens 
 ties as his painting was mysterious to those who still 
 held the faith as taught at Diisseldorf. He did things 
 that were not done by National Academicians — left 
 
 9 
 
things out or merely indicated them, slurred local 
 color for general tone. Skies were by definition blue, 
 and bis often displayed an unmistakable vibrant 
 green. Worst of all be openly scoffed at estabKshed 
 pictorial dignitaries and unblusbingly admired tbe 
 flimsy and superficial Corot. In sbort be early ac* 
 quired an Isbmaelite repute in tbe metier wbicb be 
 never took tbe pains to reverse. Tbey tbougbt bim 
 something of an amateur, and still his fame remains 
 a bit mysterious to surviving colleagues who meas* 
 ure technical accomplishment by the consecrated 
 standards of the schools. During his lifetime he gens 
 erally passed as a rather formidable eccentric. His 
 glory was esoteric. The same group that loved him 
 and his talk loved his pictures and bought them or 
 saw that others did. Thus the slack of the belly was 
 periodically taken up, and wit and pictures were 
 forthcoming for many a year. 
 
 Since Homer Martin was possibly even more re* 
 markable as a man than as a painter, it has seemed 
 well to present this thin shadow=picture of him before 
 proceeding to the more consistent chronicle of his 
 artistic development. And here it should be said that 
 the Puck4ike tricksiness of the man dropped away 
 the moment he began to paint. The cleverest of his 
 contemporaries, there is absolutely no cleverness in 
 his pictures ; just breathless, painstaking reverence. 
 In his rarely poetical evocations of nature he seldom 
 seems wholly at his ease. There is a sense of dread 
 lest the mood may fail or the hand betray it. He 
 
 10 
 
often seems to fumble delicately for his effects, as 
 Gray did in poetry. Pensiveness is his peculiar note, 
 and reticence. I cannot wholly agree with Sadakichi 
 Hartmann that Homer Martin ""makes use of land? 
 scape to express his own weariness and bitterness," 
 but evidently he never attained that roving, royal 
 familiarity with nature which is the mark, say, of 
 Inness. How the highly specialized and sublimated 
 mood and vision of Homer Martin grew out of native 
 bent and moulding circumstance is the subject of my 
 inquiry. 
 
 part Two 
 
 HOMER DODGE MARTIN was born in Albany, 
 N. Y., October 28th, 1836, the youngest of four 
 children of Homer Martin and Sarah Dodge. His 
 father, a man of Lincolnian worth and simplicity, was 
 of good New England stock and a carpenter by trade. 
 His mother, being of an old Albany family, had greater 
 pretensions to gentility. She was a masterful woman, 
 possessing in crude form that love of good books and 
 good pictures which distinguished her youngest son. 
 Both parents were devout Methodists, but the father, 
 essentially a mild man, willingly left militant piety to 
 his wife. Edward Gay still remembers how the scan? 
 daliz-ed matron once dispersed a young folks' dance 
 that had been improvised at home in her absence. 
 
 Young Homer began to draw in infancy. A pencil 
 and paper, his mother later told his wife, was from his 
 twentieth month, a sure way to pacify him. Through 
 
 11 
 
a desultory schooling that ended in his thirteenth year, 
 the boy kept to his sketching. At the paternal carpen? 
 ter's bench the lad soon proved his incapacity, and was 
 put in a shop. There, by design or from native dislike 
 of the clerkly amenities, he affronted old customers 
 and repelled new ones. He passed next into the office 
 of a cousin who was an architect and builder. Here 
 young Homer made his first creditable exit. Through 
 a congenital defect of sight he could not draw verticals 
 with assurance, and there probably were other good 
 reasons why he did not shine as a mechanical draughts* 
 man. In these apparently futile years, however, the 
 boy had matured. By some oddch ance a copy ofVol, 
 ney s ' 1 Ruins " fell into his hands . The first revelation 
 was of the absurdity of the sectarianism to which he 
 had been bred, the permanent result was a toughs 
 minded scepticism by which he lived and died. 
 
 Within three years Homer had failed as carpenter, 
 clerk and architects assistant. At this point the sculp* 
 tor E. D. Palmer took a hand and insisted that the lad 
 be permitted to succeed in his evident vocation. Pal* 
 mer was deservedly a great figure in Albany. To 
 beginners like George H. Boughton, Launt Thomp* 
 son, the sculptor; and especially to poor boys like 
 Edward Gay and Homer Martin, Palmer was a bea? 
 con light. For had he not from an artisan's begin? 
 nings attained national repute? Moreover Palmer 
 took his position as dean of the Albany artists with 
 benign seriousness. Evening after evening he 
 appeared in the back shop of Annesley and Vint, art 
 
 12 
 
dealers and colormen, to talk with all comers. Besides 
 the youngsters already mentioned, James and Wil* 
 liam Hart, both esteemed landscape painters, would 
 occasionally attend. At what was virtually an artislfs 
 club, the talk was free and inspiring. Of the younger 
 men Boughton and Martin were easily the leading 
 spirits. Boughton was then far the best painter of the 
 lot and the most judicious wit, Martin had already 
 developed his gift for gentle mystification and mon= 
 strous paradox. He dominated the group. After the 
 venerable Palmer had withdrawn, the session was 
 often continued more boisterously into the night, at 
 Taylor's or some other accredited dispensary of the 
 excellent cream ale of the Hudson. 
 
 Albany evidently supplied that comradeship which 
 is indispensable to most artists, and it supplied as well 
 loyal patronage. The tone of the State Capital had 
 been set when politics was still an aristocratic pursuit. 
 Solid old families of good Dutch and English extraction 
 had gradually accumulated wealth while preserving 
 traditional good manners and increasing an unpre? 
 tentious culture. The Albanians, were proud of their 
 artists — of the Scotch brothers Hart who had risen 
 from coach painting, of the gracious and venerable 
 Palmer whose studio became a local wonder, of the 
 whole set of ambitious youngsters who met at Annes= 
 ley's. The Albanians bought pictures gladly without 
 questioning the price. They even afforded a limited 
 opportunity for a manner of mural painting. Walter 
 Palmer writes that it was a custom to set a large land* 
 
 x 3 
 
scape above tke mantel in the place often occupied by 
 a mirror, and that most of tke larger oblong canvases 
 of tke Harts and of Homer Martin were painted with, 
 suck decorative intent. Wkatever courtesy and gens 
 erosity could do for ker artist group Albany did. Criti* 
 cism ske could not provide, and tke terrible defect of 
 an artistic apprenticeskip tkere was tke lack of fine 
 examples. Tke sentimental softness of tke leading 
 painters, tke Harts, was, to put it gently, unexem* 
 plary. Even tke boys made fun of tke Harts on tke 
 sly. Albany was only too devoted to ker local sckool, 
 and I doubt if any tking so good as a Durand or an early 
 Inness was set in any ckimney^piece. Of tke Albany 
 group only tke precocious Bougkton skowed any in* 
 stinctive intelligence for tke craft. His metkod of 
 limiting tke palette and working in karmonious tones 
 of brown and green seemed a kind of recreancy to tke 
 variety of nature. He was wellsto^do, began to travel 
 early, was settled in London by 1861, and tkus de= 
 prived kis group of a natural leader. Tkere exist a few 
 landscapes painted by Homer Martin in tke fifties 
 wkick, but for tke signature would seem too prepos* 
 terously bad ever to kave come even from kis juvenile 
 kand. Tkey are of a poisonous autumnal gariskness. 
 It cannot kave been for suck daubs tkat Palmer stood 
 sponsor for kim. Certain pencil drawings of rocks and 
 trees, fine and delicately strong, must kave settled tke 
 matter. Palmer's taste and wisdom were strikingly 
 skown in kis kopeful verdict on suck slender evidence. 
 At sixteen tke untrained boy Homer Martin was a 
 
 14 
 
titular artist. A few years later he had his studio in 
 the Museum Building, hired from James Hart, whose 
 tutelage lie evaded within a fortnight, entering inde* 
 pendently upon his single brief period of prosperity. 
 Since he once called a forest lake by Hart "a scene of 
 niggled magnitude, " it is plain that the lad's eyes were 
 already open to those problems of scale and space 
 which later preoccupied him. Martin frankly accepted 
 the traditional scenic ideal of landscape painting and 
 always remained faithful to it. An intimacy which 
 involved narrowing the view or isolating a single 
 object he seldom practiced. By generalization and 
 fine color he actually realized what had been merely 
 the ambition of Durand and Cole. Thus Martin's 
 landscape painting was the artistic fulfilling of the 
 American mode through selection, just as Bierstadt's 
 and Church's were a kind of grandiose reduction to 
 the ab surd through oversexplicitness. In his love of 
 wide, welkbalanced spaces Homer Martin seems to 
 have gone back to the authentic pioneer of the scenic 
 genre Claude. In insisting upon this scenic and tradi* 
 tional quality of Martin's work I have run far beyond 
 his Albany accomplishment. But the matter justifies 
 such an anticipation. Homer Martin has thought? 
 lessly been regarded as a minor follower of the men 
 of 1830. In a far truer sense Inness and Wyant may 
 be regarded as proselytes of Barbizon. Precisely what 
 separates Homer Martin from men who, like Corot 
 and Boudin, profoundly influenced him is this prefer* 
 ence for wide spaces and for the generalized elegiac 
 
mood which these evoke. It is said that he coined the 
 phrase 11 The Hudson River School." If so, it would 
 have been only half in jest, for he was introspective 
 enough to realize that he himself was the last and 
 greatest expression of that discredited movement. 
 
 To return to the studio in the Museum Building, 
 Homer Martin's canvases of about i860 are meanly- 
 painted, small in touch, and thin in texture, but they 
 already begin to show fine and simple arrangements — 
 a genuine scenic sense, and at least the intention of 
 large and simple masses of balancing color. Of his 
 movements in the first productive years little is known. 
 Edward Gay recalls a tramping trip through the Cats* 
 kills and an occasion when Homer wheedled a dinner 
 out of a farmer by representing two hungry boys as 
 scientific farmers in search of a domain. Some early 
 sketches indicate an acquaintance with the nearer 
 Adirondacks about North Creek ; and probably with 
 Lake George and Lake Champlain. His first exhibits, 
 in the National Academy of 1857, were of subjects at 
 Salisbury in the Connecticut Berkshires. ""Sage's 
 Ravine" and "Twin Lakes" were the titles. To these 
 lake and mountain subjects he constantly returned ; 
 some of the masterpieces of his last rally were based 
 on these earliest observations. Of mountains he once 
 constituted himself the champion against the great 
 Dr. Holmes, who had written in the "Autocrat" that 
 they were unfriendly. Homer Martin wrote asking 
 the Autocrat to visit an exhibition of his own sketches 
 then on in Boston and be convinced of the friendliness 
 
THE OLD MILL 
 COLLECTION OF LYMAN A. MILLS 
 Signed and dated on a boulder I860, canvas, 30 inches high, 56 inches wide. 
 
 MOUNT JEFFERSON AND MOUNT ADAMS 
 THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART 
 Signed and dated J868, canvas, 30 inches high, 40 inches wide. 
 
of mountains. One may assume that the kindly essay? 
 ist went, but the incident has left no trace in his pub* 
 lished memoirs. 
 
 We have seen this young painter groping under 
 disadvantages for something like rhythm in design 
 and distinction in acquaintance. Suddenly there came 
 to him a share in the greater rhythms ; he fell in love. 
 Elizabeth Gilbert Davis was his superior in education, 
 culture and position, and through thirty=nve years of 
 wedded life remained his superior in moral poise. He 
 saw her on the street, made acquaintance with her 
 brother — both were frequenters of the Philharmonic 
 concerts — and contrived that she should visit his 
 studio. The sequel must be told in the words of Mrs. 
 Martin's admirable '•'•Reminiscence" of her husband. 
 "The studio," she writes, "struck me as the 
 most untidy room I had ever entered. I remember 
 his rushing to throw things behind a large screen. 
 I was not used to paintings. Such as I had seen had 
 seemed to me mere daubs to which any good en* 
 graving would be altogether preferable. But on 
 that afternoon there was a large unfinished lands 
 scape on the easel, which even to my unpractised 
 eye conveyed the promise of beauty. There were 
 two great boulders lifting their heads out of a shal* 
 low foreground brook, and one day, much later, 
 when I was there, he painted his own initials on 
 one of them, and mine on the other." 
 With this picture called "The Old Mill" we shall 
 in due time make acquaintance. 
 
 *7 
 
They were married on the 21st of June, 1 861. Their 
 honeymoon began at Twin Lakes in the Connecticut 
 Berkshires and continued in a friendly farmhouse 
 among the upper Taconics at Fort Ann, N. Y. The 
 match seemed veritably made in heaven. She was 
 much that he meant to be. A vivid creature, admired 
 by his brilliant New York comrades, her bent was 
 chiefly literary. Edward Gay still tells gratefully how 
 she took him up, an uncouth boy, and, rightly thinks 
 ing he needed contact with the best, coached him 
 in the sonnets of Shakespeare. Soon she developed 
 her gift. She was one of the first of that remarkable 
 band of reviewers recruited at the founding of "The 
 Nation" by Lawrence Godkin and Wendell P. Garri* 
 son. For many lean years her tireless pen eked out the 
 family supplies. Like her husband she had revolted 
 against the narrow evangelical creed in which she 
 had been reared. Two persons of genius could hardly 
 have faced the future together on more equal and 
 propitious terms. Clearly their destiny lay beyond 
 Albany, and Martin, who had been a contributor at 
 the National Academy as early as 1857, went to 
 New York in the winter of 1862=63 and painted for 
 a time in the studio of James Smillie. It was two 
 years still before he found the attic studio in the 
 Tenth Street building where he was to work for 
 more than sixteen years, and brought his wife and 
 baby down to lodgings near Union Square. And 
 here opens a new chapter of struggle, chagrin, and 
 withal of joy and great accomplishment. 
 
PART THREE 
 
 IN New York the Martins were not unknown. Mar* 
 tin was actually resident in town, at 485 Greenwich 
 Street, when, in 1857, he made his first Academy ex* 
 hibit. During the winter or two when he worked in 
 Smillie's studio in the old University Building, he had 
 already begun to meet the painters and writers of the 
 city. And Mrs. Martin, who for several years had 
 been reviewing for the ' ' Leader " and 1 ' Round Table " 
 was at least a name to the literati. Thus they came 
 uncommonly well accredited to a city extraordinarily 
 hospitable to its artists. In those days people gladly 
 paid admission to see a single big picture of Church 
 or Bierstadt, while the amiable Kensett reaped an an* 
 nual golden harvest for his gently idyllic coast and 
 lake scenes. Indeed social and financial success was 
 not the exception but the rule among Academicians 
 of those days. In 1868 Martin was elected an Associ? 
 ate of the Academy, and his way should have been 
 plain. As a matter of fadl, between his painting and 
 Mrs. Martin's writing they did not do badly. For 
 years, she writes, their income ran beyond two thou? 
 sand dollars. That was a decent living as things then 
 went, yet they were never really at ease. In debt 
 when they started, there was I suppose no time there? 
 after when they were quite clear. Neither, I judge, 
 was capable of strict management. Meals occurred — 
 or failed to do so. A guest at a belated supper still 
 remembers the "moonlight lamb." It was Mrs. Mar? 
 
tin's cheerful name for a pale undercooked joint more 
 notable for exceptional hue than for toothsomeness. 
 Martin's heart was in his dreams and in his gorgeous 
 tavern times, hers was in her writing and in new and 
 keen religious experiences which he did not share. 
 Between them, things went after a fashion, and the 
 two hoys somehow came up, but from all accounts 
 the housekeeping on both sides must have been, as 
 one chooses to regard it, a sublime or a pathetic mud? 
 die. And though all the best latchstrings were out, 
 neither Martin nor his wife was capable of pulling 
 them with the requisite alacrity. New York wanted 
 not only pictures on its walls but artisrs in its drawing 
 rooms, and Martin abhorred such payment with his 
 person. In addition Martin soon committed the un* 
 pardonable offence of changing an approved style. 
 By the early seventies he was affecting colors not 
 usually seen in nature or permitted in Academy pic* 
 tures. Thus he got the repute of being a sort of eccen* 
 trie amateur, and his product, as compared with the 
 unchanging excellence of Kensett, Church, or Durand, 
 seemed undesirable either for possession or invest* 
 ment. And Martin's inspiration was painfully inter* 
 mittent. He was slow to follow up any occasional 
 success. In fact his idleness, which early became 
 legendary, has been unduly emphasized. An amusing 
 pencil sketch by Edward Gay is called "Homer Hard 
 at Work." It shows several lads of the Albany group 
 busily sketching while Homer slumbers peacefully in 
 the sun. Of course the fallow periods were not neces* 
 
 20 
 
sarily waited. To an associate who twitted Kim for 
 a summer passed without sketching Martin jauntily- 
 remarked that he had been "soaking it all in." To 
 one of dull visual memory the process may well have 
 seemed preposterous. As a matter of fact the numer* 
 ous careful sketches of the sixties disprove the legend 
 of idleness, while spells of apparent inertness were 
 often followed by periods of intense production . Still 
 Martin's irregularity was incorrigible and inconven* 
 ient enough. To gentle pressure from his wife in the 
 slack time about 1880 preceding the flight to France, 
 he responded pathetically, "I cannot paint. I do not 
 know where the impulse comes from, nor why it stays 
 away. All I know is that when it comes I can do 
 nothing else but paint, when it goes I can do nothing 
 but dawdle." Upon the straitened home conditions 
 that naturally resulted I have no wish to dwell. A 
 letter dated February 1st, 1873^0 an old Albany friend, 
 Dr. Jacob S. Mosher, says all that need be said on this 
 argument — 
 
 "Dear Mosher — Is there anyway of inducing 
 
 to send for his picture? my mother is very sick 
 
 and I have not seen her in more than a year and I 
 
 can't go up and leave s money unreceived and 
 
 unpaid out, for there are great clammors from the 
 populace of creditors. 
 
 "It is better to be in hell than in art." 
 The letter which in impetuous disregard of punctuation 
 and venial lapses in spelling is characteristic, ends in 
 quite cheerful vein with an invitation to the Century 
 
 21 
 
Club and the statement that "pleasure of course is the 
 real business of life. " It suggests both Martin's chronic 
 embarrassments and that conspiracy of friendship by 
 which he after all occasionally sold a picture and was 
 tided over to the years that saw the masterpieces. 
 
 For a leisurely biographer these friends of Martin's 
 would afford a delightful chapter. Chief among them 
 was John Richard Dennett, one of the most brilliant 
 in that great line of Whig^Radical writers who for 
 over a century have upheld the moral and literary diss 
 tinction of the Evening Post. Dennett died in 1874, and 
 oblivion, the swift meed of the higher journalist, soon 
 overtook his fame. But for Martin, Dennett remained 
 a kind of standard by which mind and character might 
 be tested. In April, 1875, Martin writes to Dr. Mosher 
 at Staten Island — 
 
 "I want to come down to your house on Sat. 
 
 evening and stay over Sunday and I want to bring 
 
 Brownell. 
 
 "I don't know if you are acquainted with B : he 
 is City Editor of the World, but, what is of more 
 consequence, he is rather the finest minded young 
 man I know since Dennett's time." 
 This was fourteen years before the finest minded of 
 our American critics had fully sh own his hand in 
 1,1 French Traits.'' It was theb eginning of a friendship 
 of singular andreciprocal devotedness. Fromthe early 
 seventies or earlier must date the comradeship with the 
 editor and the art critic Montgomery Schuyler and 
 with his cousin Roosevelt Schuyler, always alluded 
 
 22 
 
to in Martin's letters as "Robo." With his courtly- 
 neighbor in the Tenth Street Studio Building, La 
 Farge, Martin was always in close relations. One 
 would have delighted to share their talk. What a 
 perfect foil for the explosive and often pertinently- 
 slangy wit of Martin must have been the golden 
 unruffled urbanity of the most finely civilized of 
 American artists! With another neighbor, the un? 
 tamable Winslow Homer, a tacit friendliness was 
 long maintained. Then there was the generous fel? 
 low? Albanian, Dr. Mosher, the Quarantine Physic 
 cian, who took Martin to England in 1876, and ever 
 offered him at the ch arming house at Staten Island, a 
 refuge for sketching or talk or rest. In August of 1872 
 we find Martin at New Haven visiting the poet? 
 revolutionist and accomplished wood engraver, W. J. 
 Linton. Dr. D. M. Stimson and his beautiful wife, 
 whose musical talent the Martins especially enjoyed, 
 were later intimates. In the summer of 1879, Martin 
 and Dr. Stimson cruised the lower St. Lawrence and 
 theS aguenay together in a chaloupe. The trip is com? 
 memorated by certain delightful sketches which re? 
 main among Dr. Stimson's many souvenirs of taste in 
 life and in art. So one might go on, but perhaps the 
 chief intimacies of the early time have been men? 
 tioned. Martin's election to the Century Club in 1866 
 — what confidence those reverend signors showed in 
 this capricious youngster of thirty?two! — made him 
 the fellow on easy terms of many of the best minds of 
 the city, and since his capacity for friendship held 
 
 2 3 
 
undiminished by years or weakness, no complete 
 reckoning of his mates is possible. Other friends of 
 the gray, later years shall appear in their turn. For 
 the moment, I have wished only to hint at the subs 
 stantial solace that such friendships brought to Martin 
 in these years of unrelieved straitness at home and of 
 frequent misgivings as to his art itself. 
 
 I hesitate to add that this solace was all the more 
 necessary because the home itself no longer presented 
 quite a united front. Yet why hesitate over a rather 
 important fact which Mrs. Martin herself has avowed 
 in all simplicity? We have seen that husband and 
 wife at first shared the agnosticism proper to so many 
 good minds that had fed on Darwin's '''Origins of 
 Species" and Herbert Spencer's "First Principles." 
 In Homer Martin's case there resulted the sturdy yet 
 tolerant scepticism in which he lived and died. Mrs. 
 Martin, on the contrary, after her father's death m 
 1866, passed through a religious crisis which termi? 
 nated in 1870 with her baptism into the Roman Catho? 
 lie faith. She had consulted the sympathetic La Farge 
 in her perplexity, and her conversion was effected by 
 his friend, the saintly Father Hecker of the Paulists, 
 in whose church she was received as a proselyte. She 
 writes of herself and her husband in this connection — 
 "The subjects which interested me most after 
 1870 never interested him at all. Until then we 
 had been turning our intellectual searchlights in 
 every conceivable direction. At that time mine 
 steadied on its proper centre and veered no more." 
 
 24 
 
LAKE SANFORD 
 THE CENTURY ASSOCIATION 
 Signed at the left, dated 1870, canvas, 25 inches high, 40 inches wide. 
 
And indeed Mrs. Martin's Catholicism assumed 
 the intransigent and highly mystical turn quite usual 
 with converts. These churchly interests overbur? 
 dened her two novels " Katharine" and "John Van 
 Alstyne's Factory," expressing themselves as well in 
 an unfulfilled intention to enter a convent after her 
 husband should die, and in a futile attempt to effect his 
 conversion in the last days. It would he easy to over* 
 press the importance of this rift. The essential loyalty 
 and affection of the two persisted through the many 
 remaining years of hardship valiantly shared. But it 
 would also be idle to deny a certain impairment of the 
 old intellectual comradeship. Here was a new and 
 refractory element that had never been in the bona. 
 Here was a kind of warrant on his side for enlarge? 
 ment of that high convivial converse which at the best 
 times had maintained a palpable competition with the 
 home life of the Homer Martins. If, nevertheless, the 
 bond held firm, much ofthe credit was hers. No reader 
 of the "Reminiscence" needs to be assured of the can* 
 dor, delicacy and strength that were blended in the 
 character of Elizabeth Gilbert Martin. 
 
 I may have dwelt overmuch upon the personal side 
 of this fascinating pair, but without some hint of these 
 human interweavings into which were plied the very 
 fibre of the man, how could I hope to trace a course in 
 art, the fitfulness of which corresponds closely with 
 tangled destinies here only shadowed forth? 
 
 2 5 
 
PART FOUR 
 
 HOMER MARTIN'S painting falls into fairly 
 definite periods separated by experimental inter = 
 vals. A precocious and isolated triumph of his youth? 
 fill manner is ll, The Old Mill," dated i860, which 
 betrays perhaps the idyllic influence of the popular 
 Thomas Cole. Some ten years largely devoted to 
 observations and sketching in the Adirondacks lead 
 up to the great mountain and lake views of the early 
 seventies. The period opens in frank emulation of 
 Kensett and ends under the leading of Corot. We 
 may terminate what is really the first period with the 
 English trip of 1876, which brought Martin within 
 reach of the old masters. The ensuing pictures — very 
 few they are — of the late seventies show an increased 
 perfection of tone and a freer handling without much 
 sacrifice of the old blithe color, while the beginnings 
 of a more intimate and less scenic vein are noted in a 
 preference for brook and forest subjects. As acolorist 
 Martin seems to me at his best in this time. The 
 Villerville^Honfleur years, 1882=1886, mark a con? 
 siderable change in his style. Now first he feels the 
 appeal of a humanized soil. The old thin painting and 
 careful definition give way to bold and synthetic appli? 
 cation of the pigment. Color recedes in favor of tone. 
 One may perhaps suspect the influence of Boudin, a 
 native of Honfleur, whose pictures might be seen both 
 there and in the Havre gallery, but the change corre? 
 sponds to an inner necessity, is merely the culminating 
 
achievement of a life4ong striving towards simplicity 
 and unity of effect. In France itself Martin painted 
 little, but saw and thought much. A few exceptional 
 beach and meadow scenes were favorable to the trial 
 . of the new method. Its successes were achieved at 
 home in his ten remaining years. New York and St. 
 Paul saw the completion of his great French pictures. 
 To the old Adirondack and Lake Ontario themes the 
 new method was applied triumphantly. Thus Mars 
 tin's life ends in a true synthesis of all his artistic 
 experience. 
 
 With few exceptions Homer Martin's pictures 
 were painted long after the sketches or observations 
 on which they are based. Prolonged meditation and 
 selection are implied even by his early canvases. Let 
 me follow briefly the storing up of these enduring and 
 slowly germinating impressions. From a large coh 
 lection of sketches in the possession of Mr. William 
 Macbeth it is possible to trace Martin's movements 
 through the summersof thesixties and early seventies. 
 Like most of his contemporaries, he devoted himself 
 to wilderness scenery and by preference to mountains. 
 The Catskills, the Wliite Mountains, and the Adiron* 
 dacks successively called him. To bring a certain 
 breadth and grandeur out of the confusion of this raw 
 sublimity was the problem to which he set his mature 
 ing energies. Church, Bierstadt and Thomas Moran 
 were working along the same lines. But the effects 
 which they sought in multiplication of minutely ren= 
 dered detail, Martin achieved from the first by arrange* 
 
 2 7 
 
mcnt and selecti on . He had the Turneri an instinct not 
 to let "Nature put him out." The best of Martin's 
 early landscapes is unquestionably "The Old Mill" 
 which, embodying Catskill reminiscences, was 
 painted during several years under liberal conditions 
 forWm. G. Thomas, Esq., of Albany. Itnowisinthe 
 collection of Lyman Mills, Esq., of Middleneld, Conn. 
 The eye goes back from the dusky boulder^strewn 
 waters below a natural fall, over the ledge where the 
 white stream bends crisply, and beyond forest edges, 
 to a vaporous valley whose interlocking hills finally 
 lose themselves in a misty glow. The initial contrast 
 between the sombre rigidity of the foreground and the 
 vague, leafy expanse of the valley is happily estab* 
 lished. The flimsy board mill hazardously set on its 
 declivity gets a strange emphasis and dignity. The 
 actual painting is thin, hard and monotonous. At that 
 time it could not be otherwise. Yet the picture was a 
 remarkable performance for any painter of twenty? 
 four. It is probably the best landscape that had been 
 painted in America up to that date. "The Old Mill" 
 bears in Elizabeth Davis's and Homer Martin's initials 
 and a date Jy (January or July?) i860, a souvenir of 
 that moment in the studio so delicately recalled by 
 Mrs. Martin. Few American pictures can offer sucn 
 a combination of artistic and personal interest. It 
 seems to represent a happy culmination in life and art 
 of a period chiefly idyllic. For years Martin was to 
 cultivate a more austere muse. 
 
 There is a charming pencil sketch of an elm by a 
 
 28 
 
stone wall made at Salisbury, Conn., in July, 1861, 
 about a fortnight after his marriage. The middle of 
 August found him on the Lower Saranac, the end of 
 the month on the Upper Saranac. It was probably his 
 first trip to the heart of the Adirondacks, and it in* 
 volved slow progresses, most satisfactory to a 
 sketcher, on foot or by rowboat or stage. His Acad= 
 emy picture of 1861 was called "Among the Lake 
 George Hills," apparently a reminiscence of the brief 
 honeymoon visit at Fort Ann. The new Adirondack 
 impressions worked tardily. It was several years 
 before he settled down to what was to be a lifelong 
 theme. Next summer, 1862, we find him actively 
 sketching in the Gorham region amid the boldest 
 scenery of the White Mountains. His pencil point 
 searches accurately the complicated forms of falling 
 water, of rocky torrent beds, and of tangled uprooted 
 trees. The next summer finds him in the same region 
 exploring the wilderness ravine of the Wild River. 
 Again it was several years before these "White 
 Mountain impressions eventuated in some of his 
 best early pictures. From 1864 to 1869 inclusive 
 he seems to have spent all his summers in the 
 Adirondacks, which he explored widely. We find 
 him at various times in the gentle river region, then 
 unscathed by forest fires, about Long Lake, the Rac* 
 quette River and the Tuppers ; among the gorges of 
 the Ausable Lakes, and at Indian Pass. Then the easy 
 levels about the lower Ausable Valley and the gra* 
 cious splendors of the Lake Placid country engaged 
 
 29 
 
his pencil. His favorite sketching ground and the 
 region that left the deepest impress on his memory 
 seems to have been the forest=bound lakes at the 
 headwaters of the Hudson about Tahawus. Distant 
 glimpses of the bleak levels of Lake Sanford, Lake 
 Henderson and Elk Lake are the themes of some of the 
 best early pictures. On the way to and from his be= 
 loved Adirondacks he often looked down the wide 
 ravines to the expanse of Lake Champlain with the 
 blue defile of the Vermont mountains meeting the far* 
 away clouds. Such a reminiscence inspired one ofthe 
 finest of his early pictures, painted about 1872 and still 
 m the possession ofhis friend W. C. Brownell. 
 
 Martin's whereabouts in the summer of 1870 I have 
 been unable to trace. With 1871 came an unexpected 
 widening of his field. The financier Jay Cooke had 
 organized a tour for certain German bankers who 
 were expected to finance the Northern Pacific. Mars 
 tin, probably quite as much in his capacity as an enter* 
 taining person as otherwise, was invited. He is said 
 to have done a big picture of the new town of Duluth 
 which sorely displeased his promoter patron. Martin 
 painted the group of shanties he saw, making them 
 quite insignificant amid the surrounding spaces of for* 
 est and lake. Jay Cooke naturally wished some sug* 
 gestion of the future metropolitan grandeurs of his 
 terminal city. The picture has disappeared, but I 
 believe we may have the attenuated ghost of it in a 
 rude engraving of Duluth reproduced in Dr. Ober* 
 holtzer's excellent biography of Jay Cooke. It is 
 
 3° 
 
matter of history that trie German bankers, perhaps 
 looking at the then Duluth with Homer Martin's diss 
 interested eyes, did not finance the Northern Pacific. 
 
 In the early autumn of 1872 Martin accompanied a 
 railroad survey to Cumberland Gap, Ky., later going 
 over alone into the Smoky Mountains of North Caro* 
 lina. He writes Mosher of the primitive customs of 
 the mountaineers — "When I return I will tell you 
 how we all slept in one room in the mountains of Ken* 
 tucky and how the women pretended to cover their 
 eyes with their fingers, just to put on airs and seem 
 modest before city people. What will they do when 
 the railroad introduces more conventionalities ?" The 
 only record of this excursion is a prim steel engraving 
 by R. Hinshelwood, in "Picturesque America,' vol* 
 ume two. The original picture of the Smoky Moun* 
 tains with a tiny lake nestling amid the foothills of the 
 great range must have been among the most impres? 
 sive of Martin's early works. It must have been in 
 1873 *kat ^e visited the melancholy sand dunes of Lake 
 Ontario, for the first and one of the best pictures on 
 this theme is the little canvas dated 1874 in Mont* 
 gomery Schuyler's possession. It was a kind of scenery 
 that deeply appealed to Martin, and after his art had 
 been subtilized by the French sojourn, he returned 
 several times, and most successfully to these Lake 
 Ontario themes. The experience of this summer fur* 
 thered a sombre, elegiac taste that was to find its fulfil, 
 ment some twenty years and more later at the estuary 
 of the Seine and on the moors of Newport. 
 
The sketching habits of Homer Martin varied 
 greatly as he advanced. Until about 1876 he worked 
 with a hard pencil on large sheets of grey paper, about 
 twelve by twenty inches. Most of his Adirondack 
 and White Mountain studies are of this sort, and they 
 would doubtless provoke the pity or the derision of a 
 modern art student, so neglectful are these sketches of 
 mass, values, and all that we look for today. There is 
 nothing but the thin, firm contour embracing impar* 
 tially far and near objects. Occasionally there is a 
 timid indication of darker masses in middle distance, 
 often the foreground detail of rock or tree forms is deli* 
 cately and vigorously asserted with the point. More 
 rarely a dab of white tells where the sun strikes reflect? 
 ing water or mountain top. Yet these thin, oldfash* 
 ioned studies are not quite negligible. Each is a careful 
 attempt at simplification and arrangement, each may 
 be regarded as a cartoon for a future painting. In short, 
 Homer Martin reversed the common procedure of 
 sketching details and making compositions in the stu= 
 dio. His compositions he sought out of doors and 
 apparently he trusted his memory for details. There 
 are a few early sketches of boulders and fallen trees 
 in torrent beds and a few remarkable drawings of 
 tangled forest interiors, but such minute exercises 
 seem to have been rare. His sketches, as we have 
 seen, are already pictorial; he approaches nature 
 through style. 
 
 During this early period he rarely sketched in 
 color, and the memory of forms and colors implied in 
 
 3 2 
 
SPRING MORNING 
 COLLECTION OF MONTGOMERY SCHUYLER 
 Signed at the left, dated 1875, canvas, 12 inches high, 20 inches wide. 
 
 LAKE CHAMPLAIN 
 OWNED BY WILLIAM C. BROWNELL 
 Canvas, 30 inches high, 50 inches wide. 
 
the canvases of the late sixties and early seventies is 
 indeed extraordinary. 
 
 To Whistler and Albert Moore, with whom 
 Martin consorted in London in 1876, this method of 
 working with the pencil point must have seemed 
 grotesquely archaic. From this time Martin begins 
 to use charcoal. Water color he had occasionally 
 employed from the first, and by the late seventies 
 and the Villerville time it becomes a favorite me* 
 dium. In it he attained great freshness and direct 
 ness, and a handful of the aquarelles made on the 
 Saguenay and in Normandy must count among his 
 most charming works. The pictorial quality is still 
 strong in these swift notes. His composition sketches 
 of the late seventies and the eighties are mere char= 
 coal rubbings in pocket sketch books. The emphasis 
 is no longer upon contour but upon mass and light 
 and dark. A number of these studies are reproduced 
 in Mrs. Martin's "Reminiscence." They are less re? 
 markable instrinsically than as evidence of Martin's 
 quite portentous visual memory, so slight they seem in 
 comparison with the corresponding finished pictures. 
 
 Perhaps the finest canvases of the early New 
 York period are "Lake Sanford," 1870, owned by 
 the Century Club, and "Lake Champlain," painted 
 about 1872, in the collection of W. C. Brownell. 
 Montgomery Schuyler has the first version of "Sand 
 Dunes, Lake Ontario," dated 1874, and a deliciously 
 light little study of the next year, betraying the influx 
 ence of Corot, and called "Spring Morning." To this 
 
 33 
 
list one might add the stately " Mount Jefferson and 
 Adams" of the Metropolitan Museum, but this fine 
 canvas was considerably repainted long after the date 
 it bears, 1868. All the pictures of the early seventies 
 have common qualities of fine arrangement and 
 color, and common defects of a manipulation rather 
 thin and slow. But in the essentials of simplicty and 
 spaciousness such a picture as "Lake Sanford" is 
 already a masterpiece. It is hard to see how any 
 superior felicity of mere handling, such as we note 
 for example in the quite similar composition of thirty 
 years later, "Adirondack Scenery," could really im? 
 prove this early picture. Nothing could be finer than 
 the heave of the foreground ledge and the nervous 
 drawing of its firesblasted spruces, than the stretch of 
 forest, far below and quite endless, holding a bleak 
 lake in its cold embrace and finally losing itself 
 where grey drenched clouds and the evening reek 
 from far mountain sides blend and efface the sky 
 line. The picture conveys the peculiar melancholy 
 of those northern forests ravaged by fire and tempest, 
 by the ax and by their own decay. But the scene 
 yields also the tense exhilaration proper to vast unin? 
 habited spaces, and more specifically, is full of the 
 very chill that rises from these upland forest lakes at 
 nightfall. A picture of this sort should not be meas= 
 ured by the minor dexterities. It is neither more nor 
 less clever than a good Ruysdael and it has much of 
 the sober and studied Tightness of his early Rhine 
 subiects. 
 
 34 
 
The joyous counterpart to this pensive master* 
 piece is Mr. BrownelTs "Lake Cnamplain" which 
 was painted towards 1872. The glory of the picture 
 is in the distance which the reproduction largely 
 misses. Below a radiant blue sky, a file of creamy 
 clouds settles down upon the intensely blue range of 
 the distant Vermont Mountains. Miles nearer, the 
 further shore is olive green. An expanse of lake re* 
 fleets and fuses opalescently these hues of sky and 
 distant shore. Near at hand a gracious valley de* 
 scends and broadens to frame the lustrous water. A 
 sapling fringe, outcropping ledges, and fallen timber 
 diversify the foreground. Its colors are silvery greys 
 with touches of deep green. Much of this nearer 
 work recalls the early manner of Corot, whose later 
 feathery silveryness has influenced the treatment of 
 the foliage. But the color has a blitheness and candor 
 quite definitely Martin's own. There is still nothing 
 like formula or decorative artifice. The rare master* 
 pieces of this native type have a beauty of color and 
 an integrity of draughtsmanship not always present 
 in the more famous elegiac compositions that grew 
 out of the years in Normandy. 
 
 The influences under which Homer Martin ma* 
 tured may be inferred from these two pictures. George 
 Boughton, in the late fifties, brought over to Albany a 
 small picture by Corot. It was admired by his artist 
 friends, and likely enough Martin's naturally just 
 sense of arrangement was confirmed by this new 
 enthusiasm. Sometime later Launt Thompson met 
 
 35 
 
Corot atVille cTAvray and afterwards remarked to 
 one of Martin's friends that he painted as if he had 
 been a pupil of Corot. The saying reached Martin 
 tardily and he complained whimsically, "Why didn't 
 Thompson tell me that when it would have done me 
 good?" About 1870 and later the New York dealers 
 were beginning to force the men of 1830 upon a reluc? 
 tant public. At this time Martin doubtless saw many 
 fine examples of his favorite painter. But it would be 
 easy to exaggerate this influence. Martin kept his 
 love of full color, never merging it completely in tone. 
 What he drew from Corot was chiefly an increased 
 sense for elegance and clarity, and such fastidious; 
 ness was innate. One of his few recorded artistic 
 opinions, he was a man who rarely talked shop, is 
 a condemnation of Turner for presuming to hang 
 two ofhis canvases alongside Claude's incomparable 
 "Seaport." This observation was made in the Na= 
 tional Gallery as late as 1892, and it epitomizes the 
 esthetic faith of a lifetime. From what was inchoate, 
 fussy, or sensational, Martin ever shrunk. He was 
 born a classicist, in a manner a Virgilian, and nature 
 ally loved the measured serenity of such masters as 
 Claude and Corot. 
 
 But a stronger leading came from a far humbler 
 quarter. John F. Kensett is today hardly the shadow 
 of a name ; in the sixties and early seventies he lorded 
 it affably among the acknowledged giants of the 
 Hudson River School. There are still good old 
 houses in New York that boast their dozens of Kens 
 
 3 6 
 
setts. In some unmentioned limbo the Metropolitan 
 Museum keeps a full score. The pictures left in his 
 studio fetched something more than 150,000 dollars 
 after his death, in 1873. And relatively to his con? 
 temporaries he deserved his vogue. Alone among 
 them he realized that a landscape is neither an arbore* 
 turn nor a topographical display. He had inklings of 
 the principle of harmony in color that runs through 
 nature. Some of the rarer hues of sky and water he 
 at least saw and attempted to capture. Moreover he 
 knew something of the value of silhouette, of the 
 placing of the larger masses. Then he respected the 
 luminous quality of virgin expanses of pigment. He 
 never reduced color to mud on his palette nor tor? 
 tured it to dullness on the canvas. His best canvases 
 deserve Constable s lefthanded compliment to Tur* 
 ner: they look like big water colors. W. C. Brow* 
 nell finds to praise in Kensetts landscapes "a certain 
 wholesomeness, and even a soft vivacity that set 
 them in advance of most work that was contempor* 
 ary with them, and enabled them to be of a real 
 advantage at the time when their vogue was great* 
 est." Kensett possessed a thin but authentic poet's 
 vein quite exceptional in his day and rightly treas* 
 ured. From the prevailing vices of achromatism and 
 small realism he was completely free. He was the 
 only one of the older artists who was worth imitating, 
 and Homer Martin was about the only painter intelli? 
 gent enough to grasp that fact. The fine Martins of the 
 early seventies are like glorified Kensetts, Kensetts 
 
 37 
 
with the addition of nerve, substance, and higher 
 seriousness. Once more we see how truly Martin's 
 work was merely the fulfilling in a more critical 
 spirit of the finer part of our national tradition. 
 
 As early as 1867, in the second edition of -The 
 Book of the Artists," the amiable Henry T. Tucker* 
 man had found space to note in a single line the 
 promise of Martin's lake scenes. Other recognition 
 was of the scantiest in these early years, but in 1874 
 he was elected an Academician. It was not much of 
 an honor but it was at least the best the country then 
 afforded. To any man but Martin it would have 
 meant financial success. Being the Ishmaelite he 
 was, he struggled along under an increasing load — 
 his two boys grew faster than sales and prices — until 
 in his fortieth year came an unexpected respite. 
 
 PART FIVE 
 
 IN 1876 Homer Martin went to England and 
 France with his friend Dr. Jacob S. Mosher. The 
 trip included a visit to Barbizon, but Millet and Rous* 
 seau were already gone. Some " pencilling s at Saint? 
 Cloud," mentioned by Mrs. Martin, indicate a pil* 
 grimage to the favorite sketching ground of Corot. 
 The holiday included a glimpse of Holland and possi* 
 bly of Belgium. Most of the time was spent in 
 England in close intimacy with Whistler. The Pen? 
 nells record with tantalizing brevity Whistler's habit 
 of dining at "a cheap French restaurant good of its 
 kind, with Albert Moore and Homer Martin, a man 
 
 38 
 
in whom he delighted." It was the year before the 
 Ruskin outburst, and many of the soon to he notori* 
 ous and now famous nocturnes were in the Lindsay 
 Row studio, hut Martin's sturdiness prevented his 
 heing drawn into a mode which he warmly admired. 
 Unhappily no record survives of the talk of the three 
 friends. Nor do we know what artistic credentials 
 m the way of pictures Martin brought over with 
 him. There is a hint of an exhibition and of favor* 
 able press notices which I have not been able to 
 verify. Even more welcome would be some intima? 
 tion of Martin's reaction to old painting in the Na? 
 tional Gallery and the Louvre, and here again is only 
 silence. A fine canvas, "Richmond on Thames," 
 painted after his return, suggests in its beautiful rus* 
 sets and silvers and in a certain demureness the close 
 scrutiny of Constable. But in the main Homer Mar* 
 tin's art remained unperturbed by these crowding 
 new impressions. Indeed it is likely that he fre* 
 quented the cheap French restaurant and similar 
 resorts "good of their kind" in preference to the gah 
 leries and studios. He disliked the formal symmetry 
 of new Paris and adored the casual picturesqueness 
 of London. It looked he used to say, 1 ' as if it had been 
 built by individuals at different times." 
 
 By the middle of December, 1876, as we learn 
 from a letter to Mosher, Martin had returned to 
 New York very hard up, having been away nearly 
 the whole year. Apparently the pictures, including 
 the splendid "Lake Sanford," which he exhibited at 
 
 39 
 
the Centennial exhibition, Philadelphia, had failed to 
 keep him in memory, nor had absence improved his 
 vogue. It was hard to take hold again. He was more 
 than a year in finishing a large picture of Windsor 
 Castle for Dr. Mosher. It is still in the possession of 
 his son, Dr. Montgomery Mosher, of Albany, New 
 York, and is the most important souvenir of Martin's 
 English days. Martin liked it, for, writing December 
 5th, 1877, he begged it for exhibition in the following 
 terms — 
 
 "Next Sat night, dear Mosher is meeting night 
 at the Century at which I would like to make an 
 exhibition of your picture and yourself— both in a 
 highly varnished condition." 
 
 He was one of the few Academicians asked to join 
 the Society of American Artists in 1877. Rather few 
 of his pictures can with certainty be dated in the 
 late seventies, but his exhibition titles suggest a more 
 intimate sort of landscape, forest interiors and brook 
 scenes, while a few fine canvases dated 1880 and the 
 next year show that through this interval his art 
 had notably progressed. There is a brook scene 
 dated 1881, in a private collection, which catches all 
 the mystery of filtering light, and presents the most 
 beautiful and summary indications for tangling 
 weeds, underbrush, moving water, and lichened 
 venerable boulders. As compared with the pictures 
 of only a few years earlier the touch is loose, the vari? 
 ety of texture remarkable. The little world below 
 the leaf canopy has its specific and palpable atmos* 
 
 40 
 
ANDANTE I FIFTH SYMPHONY 
 IN A PRIVATE COLLECTION 
 Signed and dated 1880, canvas, 20 inches high, 30 inches wide. 
 
phere, to which is sacrificed enumeration of detail 
 and something of precision. 
 
 A more discreet mastery of these new expedients 
 is revealed in the admirable canvas of 1880, "An* 
 dante: Fifth Symphony." A forest brook broadens 
 into a shallow pool to which vague reflections of 
 rocks and trees and broken sky lend depth and mys* 
 tery. In the upper vista, boulders glint in the half 
 light before a screen of misty foliage. The rock? 
 rimmed bounds of the pool and some foreground 
 weeds are accented with great vigor, while every* 
 thing in the forest above is soft and evanescent. Tree 
 trunks loom spectrally before a general forest gloom 
 which is enlivened by the scarlet flash of a precox 
 ciously autumnal maple. The general color is extraor* 
 dinarily modulated greys qualified by broad touches 
 of russet and green. In its contrasts of preciseness 
 and mystery the picture obeys the Japanese law that 
 every composition must be clearly divided into a 
 masculine and a feminine part. And it should be 
 noted that the exceedingly delicate painting of the 
 forest is perfectly lucid. The spectator who is a 
 woodsman will have no difficulty in reading these 
 subtle indications quite literally as pine, maple or 
 poplar. While the painting is very thin, the manipu* 
 lation is most skillful and varied. Perfect tone is 
 achieved without the sacrifice of local color. The 
 picture exemplifies a momentary perfection, the high 
 point in the delicate naturalism in which Martin had 
 begun. The analogy of the stream broadening amid 
 
 41 
 
 • 
 
forest loveliness to the great And ante is by no means 
 fanciful. In some ways the picture is more attractive 
 than his more highly prized later work with its 
 broader manipulation of paint and its more convene 
 tionally asserted tone. I sometimes wonder what 
 would have happened had the public seen fit to sup; 
 port work of this excellence and made it possible for 
 Homer Martin to reach his full development in his 
 own land. What is certain is that all the expedients 
 and ideals which characterize the French period are 
 clearly enough foreshadowed in this canvas of 1880. 
 The last phase of Homer Martin is less exotic than it 
 seems. 
 
 No complete record of Homer Martin's move; 
 ments in the years from 1877 to 1881 can be made. 
 Some time in 1878 he was sketching at Concord un; 
 aer the guidance of Frank B. Sanborn who still recalls 
 Martin's agreeable manners and the somewhat gro; 
 tesque figure he cut in the evening dress that was 
 scrupulously worn at all Concord teas and dinners. 
 ' 1 Scribner's Monthly" for February, 1879, p resents 
 the fruits of this expedition in certain woodcut illus; 
 trations to Mr. Sanborn's article ""The Homes and 
 Haunts of Emerson." The sketches surely attribute 
 able to Martin are the fine designs. "Walden Pond," 
 "Concord from Lee's Hill," "Graves of Hawthorne 
 andThoreau,"and the less interesting drawing of the 
 "Old Manse." The original drawings have disap; 
 peared, the best impressions of the cuts may be seen 
 in Mr. Sanborn's book "Homes and Haunts of the 
 
 42 
 
Elder Poets, " which perhaps contains other illustra? 
 tions from Martin's hand. It was a kind of task that 
 he disliked — rather foolishly thinking it beneath his 
 dignity as an artist — and in which he did not shine. 
 Still the chance of his having done this commission 
 acceptably influenced his whole later life. It was as 
 an illustrator that he undertook the trip which led to 
 the years in Normandy. 
 
 In the summer of 1879 ^ e was t ^ ie g uc ^ °£ Dr. 
 D. M. Stimson in a boating trip on the lower St. 
 Lawrence and Saguenay. There remain a few fine 
 sketches in charcoal and in water color, with a sheaf 
 of drier pencil sketches of Quebec, which may have 
 been intended for illustration. The water colors of 
 this year show that partial subordination of frank 
 color to tone which we have already noticed in the 
 paintings of a year or two later. If Mrs. Martin is 
 right in supposing one of the finest Newport land* 
 scapes to have been painted in England in 1881 or 
 1882, we may safely set Martin's first studies on the 
 Newport moors in the late seventies. For the rest, 
 he was always a great figure in the Century Club, 
 then in its old East Fifteenth Street house, while the 
 proverbial wolf continued as of yore to keep the 
 Martin family well within ear and eyeshot. 
 
 part six 
 
 THERE is an ironic principle by which our major 
 opportunities in life are often determined by our 
 minor capacities. One is a lawyer because some cas* 
 
 43 
 
ual paradox was heard at the right or the wrong time, 
 a clergyman on the strength of an exceptional sally in 
 dialectic, a diplomat because one's boots, gloves, and 
 conversation opportunely pleased some great lady. 
 Our inner and intimate impulsions we rarely are free 
 to obey. Practically we do what it suits the 
 tary convenience of somebody or other to believe we 
 are fit for. So when in October, 1881 , Homer Martin 
 sailed for a long visit to England he went not as one of 
 the foremost landscape painters of his time but as a 
 tolerable illustrator of literary sites. He was com* 
 missioned by the "Century Magazine" to sketch in 
 George Eliot's Warwickshire, and his needs did not 
 permit him to decline an uncongenial task. In London 
 he renewed the old friendship with Whistler and had 
 the freedom of the famous yellow studio at Chelsea. 
 Being once asked to criticize its very perfect appoint* 
 ments, he remarked the ab sence of scissors. 'When 
 asked What for ? he performed an expressive panto? 
 mime with his fingers upon the edge of a much frayed 
 cuff. Though become a celebrity of the first water, 
 "•Jimmy" was still the best of comrades. The poet 
 W. E. Henley, too, was an intimate. Yet Martin 
 seems to have passed his first eight months in England 
 in frequent lethargy and despondency. The Edmund 
 Gosses, at whose home he often visited, were im* 
 pressed by the discrepancy between his sordid appear* 
 ance and evident distinction. To Mr. Gosse he seemed 
 "muffled" and quite discouraged. In any case almost 
 no work was done, and the illustrations lagged. Mrs. 
 
 44 
 
Martin's advent in July, 1882, may nave been some* 
 what in the nature of a relief expedition. She was 
 promptly taken to see "Jimmy" whose fantastic pose 
 and setting reduced her to silence, and the visit was 
 not repeated. 
 
 After her coming, the sketches of "George- Eliot's 
 Country" were quickly dispatched. Accompanied 
 by Rose C. Kingsley's text they may be seen in the 
 "Century" Vol. xxx (1885) where they seem indeed 
 a slight occasion for a notable shift in Homer Martin's 
 fate. Alfred Parsons's drawings for the same article 
 are distinguished both by their blither mood and by 
 his monogram. It was the intention of the Martins 
 to return in the Autumn of 1882, but the chance of 
 an attractive invitation to Normandy and of an old 
 friend as traveling companion took them across the 
 channel to Honfleur. Mrs. Martin records her thrill 
 when she awoke to see the tawny cliffs of the Con* 
 queror's port. Their objective was the hospitable 
 thatched farmhouse at Pennedepie occupied by WiL= 
 liam J. Hennessy and his wife. Hennessy was an old 
 friend. Successful both as painter and illustrator, he 
 was a pioneer of that harmless type of American tal= 
 ent which seeks its ease and local color abroad. Be? 
 sides, he was a neighborly person and a celebrity in 
 the region. 
 
 What had begun as a brief visit led to more than 
 four years of work and play in Normandy. By the 
 winter of 1882 the Martins were comfortably settled 
 at Villerville, near Mme. Cornu's hotel where excel* 
 
 45 
 
lent lunches and dinners were provided on quite ins 
 definite credit. Barring debt, which was after all their 
 chronic condition, it was a time of uncommon ease 
 and of closer companionship. Their French acquaint^ 
 ances were unfailing in kindness. Pleasant American 
 and English friends were often staying or visiting at 
 this picturesque village. C. S. Rinehart, whose Paris 
 studio was headquarters for Martin in his occasional 
 runs to town, summered at Villerville with his family. 
 The elder Forbes*Robertsons had a villa there. Old 
 American friends like the Brownells halted and loved 
 the peace and beauty of the place. There was a cons 
 stant coming and going of odd, diverting people, some 
 of whom still live quaintly in Mrs. Martin's " Remi= 
 niscence." It was a life both serene and sufficiently 
 varied. What the appeal of the soft beauty of the 
 place was to Homer Martin we may best realize in 
 the delightful sketch of Villerville which his wife 
 contributed to the "Catholic World" of February 
 1884. As motto she chose the line 
 
 " What little town by rft>er or sea shore" 
 
 from Keats's "Ode to a Grecian Urn." Her husband, 
 on persuasion, would recite this and other odes of the 
 poet. Observing that in France, unlike America, 
 there is no gulf between figure painting and land? 
 scape, she dwells upon the appeal of a soil immemori* 
 ally inhabited. 
 "Here all is congruous — occupation, costume, atti* 
 tude ; nay as one leaves the precincts of the town 
 
 46 
 
and strolls through lane or byway, even the nouses 
 and steep*roofed barns fit into the landscape as 
 naturally and harmoniously as the trees, the 
 fluence of whose graceful forms seems, indeed, to 
 have sunk into the souls of their rustic architects." 
 With such impressions overwhelming him it is sigs 
 nificant that Martin, who was a competent draughts* 
 man of the ngure, in the work of Norman inspiration 
 stops usually with mere symbo Is of hab itation. In 
 two or three pictures we have mussel gatherers stride 
 ing over twilight sands, but usually there are mere 
 hints of villages seen down the "water lanes" or 
 across the river, or at most some collective token of 
 man's tenure, like the ivysgrown Church of Crique* 
 boeuf or an old manor mouldering amid funereal neg* 
 lected poplars. So much Martin conceded to the spirit 
 of the place, but to the end he preferred to be alone 
 with nature, and some of the latest pictures done after 
 his return to America merit Dennett's comment upon 
 the early work in looking as if no one but God and 
 the painter had seen them. 
 
 What Villerville meant in the way of cultivating 
 a sense of color and of atmospheric gradation already 
 keen and delicate, may again best be gathered from 
 Mrs. Martin's graceful phrases: 
 
 "All this external loveliness which helps to 
 endear their native soil to men is here in the full of 
 perfection — The blue sea stretching to the horizon 
 or limited by the rosy gray of headlands and the 
 purple of distant shores; the swell of sunny up* 
 
 47 
 
lands ; the spread of flowery meadows ; the shad ow 
 of graceful trees; the generous fields from which 
 the peasants further inland draw the fruits and 
 grains which supplement a never=failing harvest 
 from the deep, over all the wide^arching, grey 
 blueness of the Norman sky." 
 The whole article is truly, as Mr. Brownell said 
 when he read the manuscript, a Homer Martin land* 
 scape in words. I cannot wonder that certain editors 
 preferred the text to the rather slight sketches illus* 
 trating it, which indeed were never published. I 
 would gladly quote at length the passages in which 
 she describes some of the scenes glorified by her hus* 
 band s art, but have space only for the few words 
 on nightfall which seem tinged from Martin's very 
 ette: 
 
 "The day deepens while we watch her. The 
 sea faints into a pale, ineffable, ghostly blue under 
 the gaze of the sun, the near pools glow with pink 
 and salmon tints : Havre still hides behind a veil of 
 haze, through which as twilight closes, the twin 
 electric light of Cape La Heve shines faintly." 
 This passage and that which precedes it form virtus 
 ally a repertory of the few small pictures and sketches 
 which Martin did in the four Norman years. Except 
 for the large canvas "Mussel Gatherers," for which 
 a charming commentary might be drawn from his 
 wife's article, and the more impressive "Low Tide, 
 Villerville," 1884, the finest fruits of these newobser* 
 vations were characteristically matured in after years 
 
 48 
 
The mussel gatherers 
 collection of william t. evans 
 
 Signed at the right, canvas, 28 inches high, 46 inches wide. 
 
 SAND DUNES, LAKE ONTARIO 
 THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART 
 Signed and dated J887, canvas, 36 inches high, 59 inches wide. 
 
of reflection and memory. Technically Martin was 
 far from ill*prepared to cope with this new beauty. 
 The art of elimination he had already mastered. Wit* 
 ness a fine canvas called " Morning" dated 1881 and 
 exhibited that year in the Society of American Art? 
 ists. Specific form is reduced to the merest indication, 
 it seems as if nothing were left but glorious color and 
 vast space. In no sense, then, did Homer Martin go 
 to school in France. Indeed he was already the peer 
 of the be si: living landscape painters there, only Puvis 
 seeming clearly his superior. Martin merely found 
 himself before a more saturated and unified color 
 than that to which he was accustomed in America, 
 and simply made certain inevitable technical changes. 
 -The paint" (writes Mr. Isham in his " History 
 of American Painting") "is laid on heavily, some* 
 times with the palette knife; the drawing while 
 true and subtle is generalized and simplified to the 
 last degree ; the sky and water instead of smooth, 
 thin, single tints are a mass of heavy interwoven 
 strokes of different tones. At base the ch ange is 
 not so great — hardly more than the use of the pal* 
 ette knife, larger brushes or more fully charged 
 with color and, a looser touch. The real essentials 
 (the feeling for the relations of mass, for the exadt 
 difference of tone between the sky and the solid 
 earth, the sense of subtle color) are the same, and 
 under every change of surface remains the same 
 deep, grave melancholy, sobering but not sadden* 
 ing, which is the keynote of Martin's work." 
 
 49 
 
To this admirable analysis little need be added. 
 Mr. Iskam finds tbat Monet and bis group, witb tbeir 
 doctrine of tbe single impression, may bave been a 
 clarifying influence, tbougb Martin never accepted 
 tbe prismatic formulas of impressionism. Tbat be 
 bad weigbed tbe pointtlliste tecbnique carefully may 
 be assumed. Howard Russell Butler visited Martin 
 in Honfleur in 1886 and saw a picture started. Tbe 
 paint was laid on in a coarse mosaic of tbe primary 
 colors. It seems tbat under mos^ of tbe late pictures 
 lies a bigbly colored preparation tbat was painted out 
 into a nearly uniform tone. In a few cases, notably 
 in "Honfleur Ligbt," at tbe Century Club, tbe un= 
 derpainting of yellow bas struck tbrougb to tbe detri* 
 ment of tbe effect. For tbe rest, Martin practiced, not 
 broken color, after tbe new fasbion, but broken tone. 
 To Tbomas B. Clarke be once wrote of bis love of 
 "putting little bits of paints alongside of eacb otber, 
 to try and make tbem twinkle." Tbis was a foible 
 sbared by many a famous predecessor, for example 
 Vermeer and Guardi. Sucb ratber dry tecbnical 
 matters reveal after all tbe astute eclecticism of tbe 
 man. He was never perturbed by bis admirations, 
 but quietly intent on wbat migbt aid in tbe better 
 expression of bis own vision. A certain coolbeaded= 
 ness is, indeed, tbe quality wbicb seems to make 
 Homer Martin at bis rare best more tban a sbade tbe 
 superior of tbe generally abler and always more exu? 
 berant Inness. 
 
 At Villerville tbe Martins spent nineteen montbs, 
 
 5° 
 
moving to neighboring Honfleur for tke sake of bet* 
 ter studio accommodations in tke early summer of 
 1884. Twenty years later in ker widowkood tkeVil= 
 lerville time seemed to Mrs. Martin ''"tke most trans 
 quil and satisfactory period of our life togetker." But 
 tranquillity was, as usual, a relative term for tkem. 
 In April, 1883, early in tkeVillerville days, ske wrote 
 to Dr. Mosker from tke lodging in tke Jardin Madame 
 (tkis address affixed on a rudely printed paster). "At 
 present we are entirely out of funds. . . . Want of 
 money in a foreign country may also mean want of 
 bread." But ske continues, after tke topic of delayed 
 or faikng remittances is exkaused, tkat Homer "kas 
 been working very kard all winter and kas done some 
 of kis best work. ... If we can live at all kere, ke will 
 do tkings wortk speaking about." Fortunately tkey 
 were able to stay on and justify tkis prediction. If 
 tke two years and more at Honfleur were less idyllic 
 tkan tkose at Villerville, tkey were still productive. 
 Mrs. Martin was indefatigable, writing no less tkan 
 tkree novels, two of wkick saw tke ligkt respectively 
 in "Lippincott , s" and in tke "Catkolic World." Mar* 
 tin painted fitfully and continued to elaborate kis 
 new metkod in a "well ligkted and spacious" studio 
 on a wkarf commanding tke busy prospect of tke 
 karbor. Tke old sk etcking grounds were still accessi* 
 ble enougk. A new and close friendskip was made 
 witk tke United States Consul F. F. Du Fais, wkose 
 son still possesses in a "Distant View of Caen"evi* 
 dence of Homer Martin's wider wanderings in Nor* 
 
mandy. In the Summer of 1886 he went on to the 
 Salon, putting up with his friend Rinehart. An un* 
 expected and opportune remittance enabled Mrs. 
 Martin to follow him. He met her with some aston* 
 ishment at the entrance of the exhibition where she 
 had been waiting for several hours. That trip may 
 be considered as a valedictory celebration. She was 
 already planning to resume the fight in New York. 
 In August, 1886, she sailed, and on December 12th 
 he joined her for a new trial of the old fortunes. The 
 French period had been chiefly a germinative inter* 
 val, but he brought back "The Mussel Gatherers," 
 "Ontario Sand Dunes," now in revised form in the 
 Metropolitan Museum, which had been unaccount* 
 ably refused at the Salon, and that radiant little mas? 
 terpiece "Blossoming Trees," and he had in his head 
 besides, half a dozen of the finest landscapes produced 
 in the last quarter of the century. 
 
 PART SEVEN 
 
 THE old studio in Tenth Street had been aban* 
 doned in 1881 . So Martin began to work out his 
 Norman memories under rather inconvenient condi* 
 tions in the family apartment on Sixty^third Street. 
 By midwinter of 1886*87 he was in more suitable 
 quarters in the studio section of West Fifty =fifth. 
 Here, according to Mrs. Martin, the canvas fancifully 
 called "The Sun 'Worshippers," with others, was 
 painted. "The Sun Worshippers" is one of the few 
 instances in which he sought the overtly picturesque 
 
 52 
 
in nature. We have a line of stunted trees with tops 
 streaming down the wind in obedience to the habitual 
 blast. Beyond is a faint sea and a veiled sky with 
 long, rising cloud streamers. Below is a bit of shaggy 
 moorland. The canvas is long and in its fundamental 
 contrast of green and gold highly decorative. Mrs. 
 Martin's paragraph on the actual look of the trees as 
 they grew near Criqueboeuf may here find a place. 
 "A row of trees bends over to the east with a curi? 
 ous exaggeration of the landward slope of all sea* 
 side growths. It would be worth a painter's while to 
 come here at daybreak and catch them all salaaming 
 to the rising sun and getting his early benediction on 
 their topmost branches." Does not the reappearance 
 after four years of this fancy of the wife on the 
 canvas of the husband suggest most eloquently the 
 closeness of their fellowship during the foreign res* 
 pite? The picture has passed into the collection of 
 Louis Marshall, Esq. "Mussel Gatherers," now in 
 the possession of \Vrn. T. Evans, Esq., was exhib* 
 ited in the Academy of 1886. Amid the plein-atrtsme 
 that was become the mode, its subtler qualities of 
 saturated color appear to have passed unnoticed. 
 The rejected Salon picture, "Sand Dunes, Lake On* 
 tario," was taken up again and finished in 1887. In 
 the Metropolitan Museum it now represents the most 
 sublimated phase of Martin's later art. On a visit to 
 the farm of his friend, George Butler, at Croton Falls, 
 N.Y., probably in the Autumn of 1887, Martin 
 painted, and contrary to his wont, entirely in the 
 
 53 
 
open air, the magnificent canvas, "Westchester 
 Hills." Butler, who besides being a very competent 
 painter was a man of taste — evinced domestically in 
 the choice of a beautiful Capriote bride — held the 
 picture for years at a refusal price of six hundred 
 dollars. Exhibited in the Academy of 1888, it was 
 not sold till after Martin's death, and then within a 
 few years, was several times resold at startling ad* 
 vances. It now would presumably fetch the price of 
 a good Rousseau. Late in the eighties, Newport was 
 revisited, and the grave charm of its spacious moors 
 left an abiding impression, resulting in two or three 
 of his finer works, such as the very similar canvases 
 in the Lotos Club and in the collection of Frank L. 
 Babbott, Esq. 
 
 It was soon clear that while the return home had 
 brought a complete renewal of the old fellowships, 
 Martin was rather farther away than ever from 
 making any public effect. Indeed the times were 
 cruel for pretty much all our painters. Between the 
 inevitable revolt against the Hudson River School, 
 the feud of Academy and Society, and the sway of 
 the international dealers, American pictures were 
 no longer freely bought. Then recurrent innovations 
 in the art had a perturbing influence. New York was 
 ready to chat about the various isms, but hardly to 
 invest money in them. What friendship could do 
 was done for Homer Martin, even criticism began to 
 be more generous. His position as an acknowledged 
 celebrity was easily regained, but in spite of a re* 
 
 54 
 
markable production of pictures, his earnings were 
 actually more uncertain than in the earlier New 
 York days. Like other returned exiles, the Martins 
 found it hard to settle. In 1890 they moved to a house 
 in West Fiftysninth Street, alongside the Convent 
 of the Paulists. To Mrs. Martin, as a devotee, the 
 proximity to her favorite church was most grateful. 
 He endured with good humor associations with 
 which his sympathy must have been slight. In this 
 house were painted "Normandy Trees," in theWil? 
 stach collection, Philadelphia, a gracious picture and 
 more solidly constructed than most of the later works; 
 "Honfleur Light," in the Century Club; the "Old 
 Manor," belonging to Dr. D. M. Stimson, a most poetic 
 cal work which will engage our especial attention, and 
 what is perhaps his best known picture, "Crique* 
 boeuf Church," now owned by Samuel Unter* 
 meyer, Esq. During these busy years Martin's health 
 failed alarmingly. His sight grew so poor that the 
 outlines had to be traced for him on the canvas. The 
 nerve of one eye was found to be actually dead, the 
 other eye was blurred by a cataract; yet his art and 
 courage rose superior to these obstacles. When his 
 wife, perhaps surmising it might be his last picture, 
 congratulated him in 1895 upon the completion of the 
 noble canvas, "Adirondack Scenery," he replied, "I 
 have learned to paint at last. If I were quite blind 
 now, and knew just where the colors were on my 
 palette, I could express myself." Since Homer Mar? 
 tin's frailties are patent, it is well to mark the power 
 
 55 
 
of mind and memory and the reserve of moral forti* 
 tude implied in this quiet remark. 
 
 In the hope of recuperation he went to England in 
 the Summer of 1892. It was the purchase of "Hon* 
 fleur Light" by subscription of some fellow^members 
 of the Century Club that made the trip possible. The 
 picture hangs in the Club in a room which also con* 
 tains "Lake Sanford" of 1870. The confrontation is 
 most interesting and, I feel, rather damaging to the 
 later picture. In spite of its mystery and more stately 
 melancholy, "Honfleur Lights" lacks something of 
 the well knit reality of the neighboring canvas. An 
 imperious mood is become a little negligent or scorns 
 fill of the substances on which after all its vision is 
 based. Much of the English holiday was spent with 
 his old friend, Mr. George Chalmers, at Bourne? 
 mouth. There was a short excursion to the old 
 haunts about Honfleur. He looked up Mile. Lemon* 
 nier, the postmistress at Villerville, who ten years 
 earlier had insisted on teaching French to Mrs. Mar? 
 tin "for love or not at all." He visited also at Havre 
 Mme. Agnes Farley, who had been a pet disciple of 
 the Martins in literature and art during the Villerville 
 days. She was shocked, she writes me, to find him 
 "very broken and almost blind." Together they re* 
 visited the old sketching grounds on the Cote de 
 Grace, but "it was rather a dreary pilgrimage." 
 
 Martin returned to New York in the Autumn to 
 find his wife under strain to the danger^point. A 
 cumulation of inordinate hack-work and worry of all 
 
WESTCHESTER HILLS 
 COLLECTION OF DANIEL GUGGENHEIM 
 Signed at the right, canvas, 32 inches high, 60 inches wide. 
 
sorts had at length shaken an indomitable spirit. In 
 December of 1892 she fled in the hope of rest to the 
 home of her eldest son, Ralph, at St. Paul, where, 
 after a nervous collapse, she gradually regained 
 strength for a new ordeal. Between ill health and 
 lack of money, her husband found it impossible longer 
 to maintain the struggle in New York. So in June, 
 1893, he followed her, taking with him in unfinished 
 condition the "Criqueboeuf Church" and the "View 
 on the Seine," which he and his wife used to call 
 "The Harp of the^Vinds." The Metropolitan Mus= 
 eum might well adopt this more suggestive title for 
 the most poetical of Martin's works. 
 
 From letters to his friends,Thomas B. Clarke, who 
 in these years handled the sale of the pictures, and 
 F. F. Du Fais, it would be possible to set forth the re? 
 maining years in all their drab details. A mere look 
 at the heavy, sprawling, tremulous handwriting tells 
 much. Hand and eye are both failing. He complains 
 whimsically that private letters have to be read to 
 him. He works in a tormenting side4ight. Still more 
 trying is the lack of companionship. ' ' I never before 
 knew," he writes to Clarke, "the importance of hav= 
 ing some one, who knows what pictures are, look in 
 occasionally and say something in the way of criti= 
 cism." Isolated by their pride and poverty amid a 
 prosperous and hospitable community, it was the 
 first time in more than thirty years that the Martins 
 had not been besought by the best people. And yet 
 the lack of congenial associations meant concentra* 
 
 57 
 
tion, which, with heroic abstinence from his beloved 
 beer, made the Saint Paul years extraordinarily pro* 
 ductive. Such a last rally as Homer Martin made 
 enlarges one's faith in human nature ; so little it was 
 to be predicted of a man nearly blind, shattered in 
 health, and baffled throughout a life time. Very soon 
 he sent back the "Criqueboeuf Church" and, for a 
 wonder, sold it. In the Academy of 1894 was shown 
 "A Distant View of Caen," painted for Du Fais and 
 the last picture publicly exhibited. In the Spring of 
 1894 some friends brought him on for a Century Club 
 reunion and a six weeks' visit. They said good-bye 
 never expecting to see him again, so clearly measured 
 seemed his strength and his days. It was perhaps 
 the glow of finding himself still valued among his 
 peers, perhaps alluring hopes of financial success, 
 later held out to him — whatever it may have been 
 that fanned the old fires, the Summer of 1895 wit* 
 nessed a true resurrection. In a quiet farm house near 
 St. Paul he finished the three great canvases, -The 
 Harp of the Winds," "Adirondack Scenery," and 
 "The Normandy Farm." The two former pictures 
 had been long sketched on the canvas and represent 
 his matures^ workmanship. With justifiable pride 
 he wrote to Clarke a few months after the pictures 
 had gone on, "I do believe I have a grip on technique 
 quite beyond any former work." 
 
 Whatever hopes were based on these three splens 
 did works were soon disillusioned. The pictures made 
 their momentary furore chiefly among critics and 
 
 58 
 
similar impecunious folk. No sale ensued, and the 
 advances on account left Martin deeper in debt than 
 ever. Something of the old wit and fortitude still 
 flickers in the letters to Clarke and Du Fais, hut the 
 blackest moods of self abasement and more rarely of 
 suspicion of others begin to appear. He worked per* 
 sistently at three new pictures, but with scant re* 
 suits, each day scraping out the work of the day be* 
 fore. Only one more pidture was ever finished, a 
 Newport scene signed in the last months of 1896. 
 As early as February 21, 1896, he hints to Clarke of 
 ' 'operations flavored with despair." In May he writes 
 to Du Fais, "the foe is eating the gizzard out of me." 
 Cancer of the throat was, though unacknowledged, 
 already present. 
 
 There are pathetic and witty passages in the letters 
 of the last year which should find a place in a biog* 
 raphy. Here I may recall only a passage in which 
 he regards his pictures as a means of saying to his in* 
 timates things that could not otherwise be expressed. 
 Aside from this, he is indifferent as to the fate of his 
 works. To a criticism that a Newport pidture has 
 too yellow a sky he retorts, "Of course the bald state* 
 ment that a picture is too any color is ridiculous." 
 On news of bad luck in selling pictures, he consoles 
 himself with the reflection that "ownership of pic* 
 tures is a figment of the brain ; you cant own pictures 
 anymore than you can poetry or music." Always in 
 these last months his thought goes back to the com* 
 rades in New York. There was a moment when the 
 
 59 
 
hopes of the Martin family rose high over a Montana 
 gold mine in which they had a slender investment. 
 "Its success," he writes to Clarke in February, 1896, 
 "will make the Martins so rich that I can have as 
 good a skylight as any other man, can paint those 
 scientific pictures I have been bragging about, can 
 give them, pay them is better, to my long suffering 
 friends as I have dreamed of doing, and when the 
 tardy clamorers come for them you and I can tell 
 them, almost in one breath, that we used to sell pic* 
 tures. ' The same letter contains a very modest de£U 
 nition of financial ease as understood by the recent 
 creator of the "Harp of the Winds." "I ought to 
 have at least $100 a month to be easy." It may also 
 be remarked that this humorous vision of the "tardy 
 clamorers" for the pictures was quite liter ally verified 
 within a couple of years, when his ears heard no 
 longer either the appalling discord or the heartening 
 acclaim of our world. 
 
 That his last days were spent in relative comfort 
 and ease was due not to the Montana mine, nor yet to 
 his wife's devoted drudgery as a proofreader, but to 
 the timely aid of the old New York friends. Martin's 
 response to Du Fais, who with Brownell was the 
 transmitter of the testimonial, is in Mrs. Martin's 
 handwriting and runs — " The exquisite delight of 
 finding myself so kindly regarded by my friends puts 
 all other considerations and values in the situation 
 quite in the background." In the same letter Mrs. 
 Martin meets the wishes of the movers of the sub* 
 
 60 
 
scription that it should he regarded as an advance or 
 loan with the happy suggestion that the sum be 
 applied to the purchase of the- Seine picture," which 
 was "the most satisfactory of his pictures from the 
 time it was outlined on the canvas." In this way 
 "The Harp of the Winds" came into the Metropolis 
 tan Museum, through the generosity, as one may 
 read on the label, of "A Group of Gentlemen." 
 
 The last line I have seen from Martin s hand is 
 dated on the eve of the New Year of 1897. It is to Du 
 Fais, regrets a dismal letter of the day before, and 
 tells the good news that Brownell has reported the 
 sale of the Newport picture to Babbott. A stricken 
 man, Homer Martin was to die in something like 
 prosperity. From that New Year the tide seemed to 
 turn in his favor, nor has it ebbed since. Of this bet* 
 tered destiny he can hardly have been conscious. 
 What had been merely the dull discomfort in the 
 throat changed into a mercifully brief space of cor? 
 roding agony, and on February 12th, 1897, the much 
 worn man entered into rest unnoticed. The New 
 York papers provided not even the usual perfunctory 
 obituary. His body lies in St. Paul. Mrs. Martin, as 
 I write, lives on tranquilly with her son at Los An* 
 geles, but the days when she was the helpmate of 
 Homer Martin have become dim to her. 
 
 61 
 
PART EIGHT 
 
 THE man being safely dead, his work began to look 
 desirable. Within five or six years the prices of 
 fine Martins were read no longer in hundreds but in 
 thousands. Take the case of what Martin once rue* 
 fully described to Clarke as "a big unavailable pic? 
 ture" — to wit, "Westchester Hills." After its exhibit 
 tion in the Academy of 1888 it was stored with a 
 painter friend George Butler, who hoped some day 
 to pay six hundred dollars for it. On Martin's death 
 this refusal naturally terminated, and two years later 
 Mr. William T. Evans " after long hesitation" ac* 
 quired the unavailable picture for one thousand dol* 
 lars. At his auction sale in 1900 his temerity was 
 rewarded by a price of four thousand seven hundred 
 and fifty dollars. In 1902, in the Milliken sale, the 
 picture, with the stigma of unavailability now thors 
 oughly removed, fetched five thousand three hun* 
 dred dollars. Should the purchaser, Daniel Guggen? 
 heim, Esq., wish to send it again to the auction room, 
 it would doubtless bring three or four times that sum. 
 
 Become a recognized and valuable commodity, 
 and the supply being quite limited, his pictures soon 
 received the flattery of imitation. From 1903 or so 
 there was a steady production of rather specious false 
 Martins which found a ready sale at prices to which 
 he himself had never aspired. At a club exhibition 
 given in honor of his memory about this time, a third 
 of the entries were spurious. Two such pictures had 
 
 62 
 
the transient distinction of being accepted by tke 
 Nation and bung in Tbe National Gallery at Wash* 
 ington. Tbe scandal came to a bead in tbe Evans* 
 Clausen trial in 1907, and tbougb tbe verdict was 
 inconclusive, tbe facts were patent. Today be wbo 
 buys a Martin of tbe later manner sbould look well 
 to its pedigree and even more keenly at tbe picture 
 itself 
 
 Tbe paradox tbat persons wbo claimed tbe repute 
 of amateurs were paying great prices for, say, tbe 
 quite third* rate landscapes of tbe Dupres, wbile 
 "Westchester Hills," tbe 11 Harp of tbe Winds," and 
 "Adirondack Scenery" could bave been bad for a 
 song, I merely note witbout comment. My subject is 
 a particular artist and not tbe various pseudo*estbetic 
 forms of buman vanity. But it is fair to add tbat tbe 
 fault did not be witb American criticism. From 1877 
 on, Martin's pictures were usually praised and often 
 in tbe warmest terms. In tbe case of Brownell, writ* 
 ing in tbese years for tbe "World," friendship and 
 critical conviction concurred in enthusiasm. Success 
 sive critics of tbe "Evening Post," among them John 
 Van Dyke and Russell Sturgis, were avowed Mars 
 tinites. W'illiam M. Laffan of tbe "Sun" was of tbe 
 same feeling. Somewhat later Charles de Kay con* 
 tinued tbe tradition in the "Times." Walter Cook 
 was an antisMartinite but bis pungent girds in the 
 "Tribune" probably helped rather than harmed the 
 victim. Equally appreciative with the daily press 
 were the art magazines. The influential "Art Jour* 
 
 63 
 
rial," in April, 1878, praised the tragic force of a Lake 
 Ontario picture exhibited in the Society and con= 
 eluded, u asa purely impressionist picture, this takes 
 its place with the dreamy distances of Corot or the 
 silver nocturnes of Whistler." In the short-lived but 
 ably edited 1 'Art Review," S. "W. G. Benjamin wrote 
 most appreciatively of Martin's exhibits of 1880 and 
 1881. Homer Martin, in short, had about all the sup= 
 port that an artist has a right to expect from contem= 
 porary criticism, and it availed him nothing. Which 
 reminds me of an experience in the studio of a land* 
 scape painter where I may have betrayed some un= 
 due sense of critical responsibility. He bade me be of 
 easy mind, for in forty years he had never heard of a 
 picture being sold or remaining unsold by reason of 
 anything critic ever said or wrote. Whether or no 
 my friend was right in a statement at once reassuring 
 and humiliating to a professional critic, it is certain 
 that the great art patrons of Homer Martin's time 
 were influenced neither by professional criticism nor 
 by the verdict of the most cultured taste. It was the 
 day of dealer?made collections, and while many deal* 
 ers made these very well, they all preferred foreign 
 pictures, especially the staple product of the Institute 
 of France and, by way of novelty, the painters of 
 Barbizon. The genial old days, when New York as 
 a matter of course bought, largely out of friendship, 
 the paintings of the Academicians, had passed. The 
 new patronage of American art inaugurated by 
 astute marcband-amateurs and far-sighted dealers did not 
 
 64 
 
AN OLD MANOR 
 COLLECTION OF DR. D. M. STIMSON 
 Canvas, 25 inches high, 38 inches wide. 
 
 HONFLEUR LIGHT 
 THE CENTURY ASSOCIATION 
 Signed at the right, canvas, 24 inches high, 36 inches wide. 
 
begin till Martin was gone. Wliile in fairness some* 
 thing of Homer Martin's ill fortune must be laid to 
 bis own irregularities, I am driven to tbe ratber lame 
 conclusion tbat bis only unpardonable fault was to 
 bave been born of original talent in a poor family at 
 tbe wrong time. Tbe wishful resignation witb wbicb 
 Martin accepted pubHc neglect means perbaps less 
 personal humility than a lucid perception of the fact 
 that without extraordinary business capacity or luck, 
 neither of which he ever had, no mere landscape 
 painter could hope to thrive. 
 
 PART NINE 
 
 HOMER MARTIN once maintained among 
 friends who were discussing the subject of story? 
 telling pictures, that there was in every picture some* 
 thing of this. And being asked to prove it from his 
 own "Westchester Hills," he answered, "Oh, the old 
 home has been deserted, and all the family has gone 
 West along that road." The retort was only half a 
 jest. The pathos of the scene does largely depend up* 
 on the impression that these fields and slopes and 
 groves are derelict, abandoned by man and not quite 
 given back to Nature. No picture of Homer Martin 
 is merely retinal and objective after approved modern 
 formulas. He was too deeply conscious of tbe V1C1SS1* 
 tudes of the earth for that. There is in the Adiron* 
 dack and Lake Ontario subjects a sense of the mould* 
 ing or fracturing agency of storm, of the passing of 
 fire or rain, of the furrowing of gullies and crumbKng 
 
of ledges. A kind of pity for the old earth blended 
 with awe at the immemorial processes of growth and 
 decay is ever present. In the Normandy pictures we 
 have the effort of man arresting and guiding these 
 vicissitudes, and there is usually a hint of the refract 
 toriness of the earth to such pains. His favorite hour 
 and light are those of early evening, when, undis* 
 turbed by the shifting pageantry of the sun, one may 
 meditate upon the uncertain tenure that man shares 
 with mute creation. There are pictures of the early 
 time and a few late ones, like " Sun Worshippers," 
 in which he yields himself gladly to the intoxication 
 of frank color and to the joy of sunlight. But this 
 festal and candid mood is at all times exceptional. He 
 brings usually to the observation and pictorial inter* 
 pretation of nature, a definite and poetical mood full 
 of that noble and measured melancholy, which in 
 poetry we call elegiac. It was the mood proper to a 
 lover of Keats and Beethoven. 
 
 Every picture of Martin, then, represents a com* 
 plexof recurrent moods, observations and memories. 
 His tradition is the contemplative one and absolutely 
 alfen to the instantaneous reactions of impressionism. 
 And his habit of constantly returning to old themes 
 is significant. Between 1874 and 1887 there must be 
 four or five versions of "Sand Dunes, Lake Ontario," 
 each one coming a little nearer the light poise of the 
 remote dunes between sky and water, and each work* 
 ing out finer symbols of swart aridity in the forms 
 of the foreground trees. Indeed every picture of his 
 
 66 
 
is quite slowly and thoughtfully elaborated as a con; 
 scious arrangement. The matter stands very plain 
 in his own words to Thomas B. Clarke in a letter 
 dated February 25, 1896. "As to the pictures in sight 
 ... in sight, that is to me, the 28x40" (probably Mr. 
 Babbott's "Newport") "is all thought out except one 
 or two cloud forms which trouble me greatly. The 
 larger picture in which I intend to sum up about 
 what I think of the woods" (apparently it was never 
 finished) "needs considerable scene shifting before the 
 curtain can be raised. ... It might be ready for the 
 Autumn openings if I settle on the arrangement ofthe 
 parts soon." Such testimony as to the wholly con* 
 scious intellectuality of Homer Martin's invention 
 dispenses me from further analysis. I wish in lieu of 
 a formal criticism to trace the quality of the inspira* 
 tion and pictorial idiom in three consummate exam* 
 pies,— "An Old Manor House," "The Harp of the 
 Winds," and "Adirondack Scenery." 
 
 Beneath a troubled gray sky, in which a single flash 
 of red gives the last signal of dying day, the old manor 
 house stands amid a copse of leafless, untrimmed 
 poplars. Vacant doors and windows are so many dark 
 gashes in the warm^brown, crumbling wall. The sor- 
 did trees are swarthy and their branches give forth a 
 peculiar murkiness that invests the deserted mansion. 
 It seems as if some memory of Poe's "House of Usher" 
 must have been in the artist's mind as he painted, so 
 exactly does he make visual the familiar words : 
 "About the whole mansion and domain there hung 
 
 67 
 
an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their 
 immediate vicinity — an atmosphere which had no 
 affinity with the air of Heaven, but which had 
 reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray 
 wall, and the silent tarn, — a pestilent and mystic 
 vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden; 
 hued." 
 
 Between the spectator and the lonely manor lies a 
 lustrous, stagnant pool, marbled strangely with con* 
 fused reflections from shore and sky, and containing 
 more clearly the chill image of the desolate house. 
 Such a house and such a pool exist at Criqueboeuf, but 
 again the conviction imposes itself that this is ""The 
 bleak and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre" by 
 the "House of Usher," wherein one might lookshud; 
 deringly upon "the remodelled and inverted images 
 of the gray sedges, and the ghastly tree stems, and the 
 vacant and eye4ike windows." Yet the mood of this 
 intensely tragic picture is not one of horror. There is 
 a kind of overwhelming pity in it, as if the departing 
 gleam were the sign of countless days that had gone 
 down in sadness ; the old manor among its sordid im* 
 prisoning trees, a veritable symbol of all glories that 
 have departed. For a melancholy, entirely composed 
 and noble, yet moving to the verge of tears, I hardly 
 know in the whole range of landscape art an analogy 
 for this picture. To one who feels its emotional con? 
 tent, it will seem sheerest pedantry to remark its 
 soberly splendid interweaving of warm browns and 
 luminous grays, or such felicities of arrangement as 
 
 68 
 
the proportions of the pool to the rest, the massing of 
 the trees against the sky, and the liberating lift of the 
 land at the right. 
 
 Unless it he 1 1 Criqueheouf Church," the "Harp of 
 theV/inds" is Homer Martin's most famous picture, 
 as it is his most admired and accessible. That appro* 
 priate title, which he and his wife always used be* 
 tween themselves, he declined to use publicly, fearing 
 lest it seem too sentimental. ''But that," writes his 
 wife, "was what it meant to him, for he was thinking 
 of music all the while he was painting it." She tells 
 us, too, that the trees were originally much higher, 
 and, with their reflection in the slow current, assumed 
 more explicitly the form of a harp. The change she 
 regretted, in which I think few will follow her, for 
 nothing could be more satisfyingly gracious than this 
 file of slender tufted trees bending suavely with the 
 curve of a broadening river. Upstream, the light 
 touches the white* washed houses of a village. A slight 
 dip in the low skyline suggests the upper winding 
 course of the quiet river. The clouded sky, shot with 
 pale bars of gold and silver over a tenuous blue, has 
 that peculiar diagonal rise, which gives height and 
 movement. Silvery gray is the prevailing tone, into 
 which are worked discreet enrichments of yellow, 
 dull green, and blue. The rough and lustreless surface 
 is remarkably luminous. A sober preciousness, both 
 earthy and ethereal, comparable to the mysterious 
 bloom of fine Japanese pottery, is characteristic of the 
 whole effect. One may note the ingenuity by which 
 
 6 9 
 
all the curves which are arbitrary elements in a beau? 
 tiful pattern in plane are also essential factors in depth. 
 Suck harmonizing of arabesque with spatial suggest 
 tion is of the very essence of fine composition. Better 
 than such pedantries, it may be simply to say that 
 no landscape in the Metropolitan Museum will more 
 immediately arrest the attention, and few will better 
 endure prolonged contemplation. 
 
 "Adirondack Scenery" is perhaps the best epitome 
 of Homer Martin's entire achievement, being based 
 on memories that had been turned over and refined 
 for more than thirty years. Its direct prototype was 
 a small canvas called the "Source of the Hudson." It 
 is the richest in color of all the later works and possi* 
 bly the broadest and most skilful in handling. The 
 eye looks beyond gray, flat ledges over a stretch of 
 brown second^growth, amid which flash rare scarlet 
 maples, beyond a shallow valley and a shaggy distant 
 ridge, to a steely lake where all the mountain slopes 
 converge. The further ascent catches a golden per* 
 meating bloom from a dense vapor bank that recoils 
 from the higher barrier and casts down a shadow. 
 These vapors surge forward in a lurid and swirling 
 yellow mass, thinning at the sides and top into the 
 serene blue of a rain^washed sky. A peculiar and 
 soothing gravity, proper to the vast spaces repre^ 
 sented, is the ruling impression. One would be dull 
 of heart indeed who could stand before this picture 
 without a renewed and consoling awe at the secular 
 balance of earth, air, and water which brings beauty 
 
 70 
 
out of ravage and calm out of strife. Nor is there 
 anything mystic or far-fetched about the picture. Its 
 highly generalized forms are firm, its textures of for, 
 est, rock, and cloud, unexaggeratedly veracious. I 
 think it would appeal almost as strongly to a woods* 
 man as to a poet. 
 
 Unless I have grossly misread these pictures, we 
 have to do with a most distinguished kind of imagina* 
 tion, with a mind keenly lyrical and meditative. The 
 inspiration is not so much various as authentic and 
 deep. From beginning to end of Homer Martin's 
 painting we have much the same kind of transaction 
 between a sensitive clairvoyant spirit and natural 
 appearances. What he seeks in nature is solace, sus* 
 pension of the will, expansion of the contemplative 
 self The mood I have in passing called Virgilian. It 
 might be well to add — of a Virgil exiled in an untamed 
 land. The feeling is essentially pagan, and not to be 
 confused with the Wordsworthian and mystical 
 temper which it superficially recalls, nor with the 
 sentimental primitivism of the Rousseauists. It is 
 somewhat stoical, valuing Nature, chiefly as a means 
 for regaining in tranquillity the form of one's own 
 spirit. The sentiment might be paralleled in Milton 
 and is not uncommon in the eighteenth century 
 poets, such as Gray, though then it sometimes implies 
 a quite unstoical revolt against society. I find nothing 
 of this Rousseauism in Martin. It seems to me that 
 his temper is quite classically poised and his real con? 
 cern with the governance of his own soul. We find 
 
 7 1 
 
a similar stoicism paradoxically interblent with the 
 Christianity of Bryant. One of his best poems, "A 
 Winter Piece," a poem that curiously anticipates 
 much recent pictorial concern with Winter scenery, 
 breathes in a somewhat simpler tone much of the 
 mood of Homer Martin's pictures. 
 
 The time has been that these wild solitudes, 
 Yet beautiful as wild, were trod by me 
 Oftener than now, and when the ills of life 
 Had chafed my spirit — when the unsteady pulse 
 Beat with strange flutterings — I would wander 
 forth 
 
 And seek the woods. The sunshine on my pa th 
 
 Was to me a friend. The swelling hills, 
 
 The quiet dells retiring far between, 
 
 With gentle invitation to explore 
 
 Their windings, were a calm society 
 
 That talked with me and soothed me. 
 
 Such a mood may sometimes be merely the evasion 
 of a weak spirit, but Homer Martin, if wayward was 
 not weak. He expresses a solace that strong spirits 
 have often felt in Nature, a sentiment that has been 
 the staple of poetry from the days ofthe sages oflnd 1a 
 and China, through Oedipus at Colonus and the sto? 
 ics, to our own century. His vein is narrow but in 
 the finest tradition and of the most evident personal 
 authenticity. 
 
 Yet, saving only La Farge and Vedder, I have never 
 heard a painter speak in unreserved praise of Mar? 
 
 7 2 
 
ADIRONDACK SCENERY 
 COLLECTION OF MRS. SAMUEL UNTERMYER 
 Signed at the right, canvas, 29 inches high, 40 inches wide. 
 
tins work, and I have heard painters whose opinions 
 are usually worth while declare that it is negligible. 
 No formal rebuttal of such opinions seems to me nec= 
 essary, but a word as to standards may be in order. 
 The value of any work of art, I believe, is solely that 
 it should communicate a choice and desirable emo? 
 tion. This is true even of so-called impersonal art. 
 In Manet, for example, quite the most objective of 
 painters, one shares a tense and distinguished curi? 
 osity. Now the person who gets no such choice and 
 desirable emotion from the art of Homer Martin, may, 
 if he be assured that his sensibilities have reached their 
 limit of education, quite properly neglect work from 
 which he derives no pleasure. Which comes to says 
 ing that the reasonable criticism of a work of art is 
 always of its emotional content, and so in a manner 
 of the artist himself It is always competent to declare 
 that this emotional content, however strongly and 
 consistently expressed, does violence to our own na* 
 ture and is for us undesirable. Indeed any other 
 unfavorable criticism of a work of art seems in the 
 nature of things superfluous and absurd. 
 
 If this very simple principle were understood, it 
 would save much confusion. There is abroad an ultra? 
 romantic assumption that we are always bound to 
 accept the point of view of the artist but perfectly at 
 liberty to object to his technique. Precisely the reverse 
 is the case. His point of view, having all sorts of 
 general and vital implications, we are entirely free to 
 accept or reject, being bound merely to understand it, 
 
 73 
 
V 
 
 while the particular rhetoric of his expression, heing 
 idiosyncratic and necessary, we must accept, and the 
 less we bother about it the better. To do otherwise is 
 to miss the whole point. You may, for instance, at? 
 tack Claude as a poor imagination, but not as a flimsy 
 executant. Yet, many admit his poetry and deplore 
 his tree^forms or the thinness of his pigment or what 
 not.. Which is one of the more asininely specious 
 forms of esthetic pedantry. 
 
 With men for whom a George Fuller or a Eugene 
 Carriere is primarily a feeble draughtsman I cannot 
 argue. Let them come out honestly and say they 
 think the sentiment is forced or cheap, and we can 
 selfrespectingly agree to disagree. And my grudge 
 against my painter friends who decry Homer Martin 
 is that they do not discuss his sentiment, but assert 
 some weakness in his diction. He splits his pictorial 
 infinitives or ends his phrases feebly with a preposi? 
 tion, or otherwise breaks the rules. Whose rules ? 
 I admire those who know so exactly how a vision 
 they themselves have never entertained save through 
 what they call a defective form of expression should 
 be conveyed. Yet there is a professional realm in 
 which these technical matters are subject of legiti* 
 mate interest. Only we should keep in mind that 
 such considerations are subesthetic and quite seconds 
 ary . Taking the work of Homer Martin on this lower 
 plane, it is obvious that he is not, strictly speaking, a 
 great painter. The zest, variety, swiftness, and deft* 
 ness of the consummate practitioner he has fitfully, 
 
 74 
 
and on the whole, rarely. An impeccable sense of 
 mass and close-knit atmospheric balance was not bis. 
 Tryon, wbo, in some respects, may be regarded as bis 
 closest living affinity, is more ski lful and curious in 
 tbese matters. I bave sometimes felt tbat Henry 
 Wolf 's admirable woodcut copy of tbe " Harp of the 
 Winds" was just a sbade more substantial and fine 
 tban tbe original. Yet it is precisely tbe twilight, and 
 occasionally unsure vision of Homer Martin that we 
 value. And the unsureness in no wise affects what 
 he has to say to us. Beautiful pattern, vibrating color, 
 distinguished mood — all these things are precisely and 
 fully conveyed. What matters it while the "Harp of 
 the Winds" balances rhythmically in pellucid air and 
 shimmering water that perhaps you couldn't walk 
 on the nearer strand? The fact that you conceive the 
 feat shows that you have missed the picture entirely. 
 
 To those who are sensitive to the gracious and 
 highbred melancholy of Homer Martin's work, this 
 explanation will be superfluous. To others it may be 
 said that his alleged technical weaknesses are of the 
 emotional essence and stand or fall with the emotion 
 itself. He was a lover of clear thinking, and this must 
 be my excuse for a digression that may clear up a con* 
 fused attitude towards his work. He seems to me a 
 singularly appealing type of the minor artist, the kind 
 one loves better than those of accredited greatness. 
 For variety, copiousness and vitality, Inness, Wins? 
 low Homer, and perhaps Wyant are his superiors ; 
 any of these comes nearer to meeting the usual notion 
 
 75 
 
of the great painter, and yet I would sacrifice all their 
 work if I might keep the "Manor House," or "Adi? 
 rondack Scenery." Not because I underrate these 
 large and genial personalities ju& mentioned, but be? 
 cause I believe that the future is more likely to dupli* 
 cate approximately their type of vision and degree of 
 skill. I imagine Homer Martin's fame as compared 
 with theirs will suffer vicissitudes. He is more aloof 
 and complicated; they more simply explicable and 
 more nearly related to average wholesome predilec* 
 tions. They are more democratic and of our land and 
 time, he more aristocratic and more free of the whole 
 world of contemplation, I can imagine Homer Martin 
 being at times forgotten. I am equally certain that he 
 will be perenially rediscovered, and always with that 
 thrill which the finding of some bygone poet of minor 
 but delicately certain flight brings to the man of open 
 heart and sympathetic imagination. 
 
 7 6 
 
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