HOMER MARTIN

Thelittle aloofness of manner that prevented Wyant from being a pronounced social light was not a characteristic of Homer Martin. From his youth upward Martin was companionable, had in fact something of a genius for making friends. All through his life he maintained social relations with the wise and the witty of his time, moved in intellectual club circles, and both at home and abroad was accounted a man of mind, a rareraconteurand conversationalist, a most attractive personality. His droll comments and quick retorts are still told at his club, and form perhaps something of a contrast to his pictures hanging upon the walls near by.

For there was never anything amusing about Martin’s art. He indulged in no drollery of the brush, and no intelligent person ever got a smile out of his canvases. They are serious, almost solemn, affairs. Mrs. Martin, in her delightful reminiscences of her husband, quotes John R. Dennett as saying that “Martin’s landscapes look as if no one but God and himself had ever seen the places.” There is, indeed, nothing of human interest about them. A distant figureor a house is occasionally introduced as a light spot in a dark plane, or otherwise to help out the composition; but the figure always suggests a wraith or a spook, and the house is deserted or haunted. Says Mrs. Martin:

“There is an austerity, a remoteness, a certain savagery in even the sunniest and most peaceful of his landscapes, which were also in him, and an instinctive perception of which had made me say to him in the very earliest days of our acquaintance that he reminded me of Ishmael.”

There is no contradiction of character in these two phases of Martin’s mentality. They argue merely versatility. He was exceedingly fond of the silent, even melancholy, beauty of nature, as he was of the solemn seriousness of fine poetry; but these were not themes for talk at the club. Mrs. Martin says she never heard him “talk shop” and that, with several notable exceptions such as La Farge and Winslow Homer, most of his close friends were people in other professions than painting. He never tabooed art as a topic of conversation, but he could talk on other themes quite as well. The mental facet that reflected him as a man of the world gave out a different light from that which proclaimed him a poet in landscape. His was not a one-facet mind.

What part heredity played in his equipment may only be guessed at. His father was a mild-mannered carpenter of New England descent, his mother a strong-willed, quick-witted womanbelonging to an old Albany family. It is usually assumed that Martin derived from his mother and got his artistic instincts from her. These latter, it seems, developed early—the mother testifying that before he was two years old she was accustomed to quiet him by giving him pencil and paper. At five he did what has been called a “spirited” drawing of a horse. Doubtless every one can remember something of the same sort told about his own infancy. The drawing habit is common to almost all children and usually means little.

But Martin was to demonstrate shortly that he could do nothing else but draw and make pictures. At school in Albany (where he had been born in 1836) he was not a shining success. He said himself that his school-days had been spent in looking through the windows at the Greenbush Hills and longing for the time when he could get over there and draw them. At thirteen his schooling ended, much to his after regret. He then went into his father’s carpenter-shop, but that proved as little attractive as the schoolroom. A clerkship in a store ended disastrously owing to his non-recognition of the amenities of business life. Then he entered an architect’s office and failed there because of defective eyesight. He could not see or draw a vertical line properly. Later on he was eliminated from the Civil War draft because of this same defective vision. His special fitness for the painter’s craftwas not very obvious at this time, and yet he was headed strongly that way.

It was E. D. Palmer, the sculptor, who persuaded the father to allow Martin to go on with art. Palmer was then the art oracle of Albany, with a little coterie of painters about him consisting of such men as James and William Hart, George H. Boughton, Edward Gay, Launt Thompson. Martin knew them as a boy; and, after sixteen, doing pretty much as he pleased, he frequented their studios, and for two weeks was a pupil of James Hart. That is the only direct instruction he ever received. Before he was twenty he had opened a studio of his own in Albany, was quite well known as a youthful prodigy, and was generally thought to have in him the making of an artist.

It was in Albany that he met and married in 1861 Elizabeth Gilbert Davis, a clever woman who afterward developed much literary ability and became well known not only as a reviewer inThe Nationand other periodicals but as a novelist and magazine writer. The marriage was altogether fortunate and happy, though at times pecuniary difficulties incident to the artistic and literary life weighed heavily upon them. She was a rod and a staff to comfort him, and there is no record that she ever flinched or failed or regretted her choice. In their early married life there were few trials, she recording that they were fairly prosperous, that he receivednumerous commissions for pictures, and that they had made many friends. They had stayed on in Albany until the winter of 1862-1863, and then had moved to New York. In 1864 he had a studio in the Tenth Street Building, and his near neighbors were Sandford Gifford, Hubbard, Griswold, J. G. Brown, McEntee, Eastman Johnson, and, later, John La Farge.

This was a time of comparatively rapid production with Martin and also a time when many influences might be supposed at work upon him; but in reality none of the influences seems to have made much of an impression. His early work is now infrequently seen, but what there is of it, though small, bright, and a little crude, is nevertheless quite distinctly Martinesque. He had, of course, inherited from the Hudson River school (a name that Professor Mather declares Martin originated) the “view” in landscape. With the panorama had come down the studio method of small detailed treatment, and Martin at first paid it allegiance but he very soon saw its defects. As a boy he could speak of a picture by his master, James Hart, as “a scene of niggled magnitude,” and Mr. Brownell tells me that he had always talked much of “generalization” in landscape.

His early pictures show this generalization not so much perhaps in breadth of handling as in breadth of view. He was even then seeing the large elements of earth, air, water, and sky.Naturally enough, his brush was a little fussy with foliage, dead-tree trunks, rock strata, and foreground properties in general; but he could see the unity of mountain ranges, the continuity of air, the omnipresent radiance of light, the great heave of the sky. He already had the vision but not, as yet, the full means of revealing it. It was practically the same nature that Cole and Church had seen, but they saw it in its surface aspect, where Martin saw it in its depth. The difference between them was the wide difference that divides the superficial from the profound.

With his early pictures Martin had made considerable success. As far back as 1857 he had exhibited at the National Academy of Design; in 1868 he was elected an associate of the Academy, and in 1874 he was made a full academician. His landscape material at first had been gathered in the Berkshires, then he seems to have tramped and sketched with Edward Gay in the Catskills. In the early sixties he went to the White Mountains, and from 1864 to 1869 he was every summer in the Adirondacks. In 1871 he went to Duluth, Minnesota, at the invitation of Jay Cooke, but the next year found him in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. He was a mountain lover, almost exclusively so, at this time, and apparently not quite happy away from them.

Professor Mather, who has closely traced Martin’scareer in a notable monograph,[3]says that his sketches in this early period were made with a hard pencil on sheets of gray paper. They were minutely done, drawn in outline, without color, and with no dash or smudge or mere suggestion about them. The pictures painted from them in his studio were perhaps less detailed than the sketches, and as for their color, he no doubt relied upon his visual memory or his instinct for tone and harmony. After 1876 he began to use charcoal in sketching, and later on he took up water-colors and made drawings with them along the Saguenay and elsewhere. Doubtless these later sketch mediums had come to him on his first trip abroad in 1876.

[3]Homer Martin: Poet in Landscape, by Frank Jewett Mather, New York, 1912.

The climax of his early work—that is, before 1876—seems to have been reached in such pictures as the “Lake Sandford.” It was shown at the Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia in 1876, but painted probably as far back as 1870. The scene is in the Adirondacks, and Martin has pictured the lake looking down from a distant height. There is a dark foreground of outcropping rock, then the light-reflecting surface of the long lake, then a ridge of dark mountains, and back of that the light sky—four planes in alternations of dark and light. It is woods, rock, water, and sky—no more. The largeness of Martin’s view, with its grasp of suchessential elements as light, air, and space, is quite apparent notwithstanding a handling that seems too small for it. There is no petty puttering over leaves and stones, but the small catches of light-and-dark in the foliage, the tree trunks, the rocks, the sharp, clean-drawn outlines conceal rather than reveal the conception. Moreover, the smooth, enamel-like surface seems to act as a binder and a restraint. An excellent picture, as many another that he painted during this period; but Martin had not yet entirely emerged from his early manner, was not yet expressing himself fully and freely.

At this time, no doubt, he had seen in America some works by Corot and the Barbizon men and had been impressed by them, but a new period was to begin for him with his first trip to Europe. This was in 1876. He went to England, where he met and became intimate with Whistler and Albert Moore, then to France, where he visited Barbizon, though Millet and Rousseau were dead. He also went to St. Cloud to see Corot’s sketching-ground, and sketched there a bit himself. He did not do much painting. All of his sojourns abroad were times of study and observation. Mrs. Martin says that his working periods were very irregular, that he absorbed things by a slow means rather than painted by wilful effort; and he himself insisted that he could not paint without the impulse. Of course all this was set down to him as indolence by thehypercritical, but at the present time it is well understood that mental preparedness is necessary for the production of any great work, and that periods of long reflection are not periods of idleness.

He returned to New York in December of the same year and took up his painting, but he was now making some decided changes in both his matter and his manner. The generous expanse of the panoramic view was cut down to more modest landscape proportions. No doubt that had come to him from seeing thepaysage intimeof Corot, Rousseau, and Daubigny. Possibly, too, he had been persuaded by the broad, simple landscapes of Georges Michel, whose pictures were then well known not only in Paris but in New York. At any rate it is quite apparent in Martin’s work after 1876 that he was gradually discarding the “view” for something smaller and more intimate. It was still a mountain landscape known only to God and himself and had no human appeal, but it expressed Martin’s thought and feeling much better than the earlier affair.

His brush, too, was broadening. It was beginning to sweep over details, spots, and sparkles, and to emphasize masses of light or dark or color. Exactness of statement, sharpness of line, emphasis of drawing were hindrances rather than helps to expression. Later on, no doubt, he would have agreedin totowith a remarkattributed by Charles Ricketts to Puvis de Chavannes: “La perfection bête qui n’a rien à faire avec le vrai dessin, le dessin expressif!” It was not until near the end of his career, when his eyesight had nearly gone, that Martin felt himself free from the restraint of method and materials. He then said to his wife in reply to some praise of a picture on the easel: “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 my self.”

But long before he thought himself able to paint he had arrived with painters and paint-lovers. In 1877 he was asked in at the birth of the Society of American Artists, and was an initial member of that organization. The next year he went to Concord forScribners Monthly[4]to do some illustrations for an article on that place, and in 1881 he was sent to England by theCentury Magazine[5]to prepare some illustrations of George Eliot’s country. Martin did not altogether like making the illustrations and considered it as only hack-work. And it seems that theCenturypeople did not particularly care for his work, though just why would be hard to discover. To the casual critic of to-day looking at these drawings in the magazine they seem excellent, and, moreover, they are decidedly Martinesque though worked over by an engraver.

[4]Scribners Monthly, February, 1879.

[5]Century Magazine, vol. 30, 1885.

In London once more, the Martins saw much of Whistler and something of such literary people as Henley and the Gosses. After the illustrations were made they crossed over to France. It was planned to return soon to New York, but some unexpected money arrived and they stayed on at Villerville in Normandy. There and at Honfleur they remained until late in 1886. It was perhaps the most enjoyable period of their lives, for though they were poor in purse they were well-off in friends, and W. J. Henessey, Duez, Reinhart, the Forbes-Robertsons, the Brownells, and others came to see them. Life in Normandy was very attractive—perhaps too attractive for Martin’s work, for he seems to have completed few pictures while there. It was another period of absorption during which he sketched and laid in many pictures which were afterward finished in America—such pictures as “Low Tide, Villerville,” “Honfleur Light,” “Criquebœuf Church,” “Normandy Trees,” “Normandy Farm,” “Sun-Worshippers,” and the “View on the Seine.” He was not a painter to do a picture at one sitting. He required time and much musing before production.

Back once more in New York, Martin took a studio in Fifty-fifth Street, where he completed many of his Normandy canvases. After 1890 he had a painting-room in Fifty-ninth Street, where he did the “Haunted House” and the “Normandy Trees.” In 1892 he made a lasttrip to England, and spent some time at Bournemouth with George Chalmers. Returned again to America, he went to St. Paul to join Mrs. Martin, stopping on the way at the Chicago Fair, where a number of his pictures were shown. At St. Paul his eyesight began failing to an alarming degree. A famous oculist declared the optic nerve of one eye dead and the other eye clouded with cataract. But Martin now painted on with redoubled energy, as though conscious that his time was short. He finished a number of pictures and sent them on to New York, where he had a selling arrangement with a dealer. But alas! the pictures did not sell, and shortly afterward the painter laid aside his brushes. He was fatally ill with a malignant growth in the throat, and death came to him as something of a relief in 1897.

seine“View on the Seine,” by Homer D. Martin.In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.(click image to enlarge)

“View on the Seine,” by Homer D. Martin.

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.(click image to enlarge)

It was in these latter years only that Martin said that at last he had learned how to paint. Mrs. Martin had been lauding a picture called “The Adirondacks,” saying that if he never did another stroke he would go out in a blaze of glory, and it was his answer to her. He probably meant by the remark that he had arrived at a method of handling that fully expressed his thought. In reality it was the same old method, only it had been broadened and simplified. Except in his very early works, Martin had never been given to excessive surface detail. He painted with a comparatively broad brush almostfrom the start—painted with a flat stroke rather than with a stippling point. The “White Mountain” picture in the Metropolitan Museum, painted in 1868, shows substantially the same brush-work as the “Lake Ontario Sand Dunes” of nearly twenty years later. The sand-dunes picture seems to have been done largely with a palette-knife. Apparently it is trowelled across the canvas, with one tone or color laid over another, flattened down, compressed, blended. This applies especially to the sky; only the dead trees in the foreground are painted with a brush. In the “View on the Seine,” also in the Metropolitan Museum, the foliage and rocks are painted with the brush, but, again, the sky and water seem laid down in layers of paint, put on in long bands, and flattened to a lacquered surface. These bands of color in the sky, superimposed one upon another like platings of glass in a La Farge window, appear again in the “Honfleur Light.” All the hues seem blended by superimposition to produce a golden opalescent glow in the sky. Mrs. Martin said he used colors as a poet does words, and here, no doubt, he was getting orchestration in his sky by fusing many colors together.

But back of the method was the point of view which perhaps unconsciously begat the method. Martin always had a fancy for the great, the essential, elements of nature. And he saw things in their large relations, but at first wasbothered by their protrusive and petty facts. When finally he came to paint only what he loved and let the rest go, he arrived at full expression. To paint space, air, pervasive light, color—to paint these alone—was to emphasize them, to characterize them by isolation, as though the painter should say: “I mean you to look only at the things I love and you shall see that they are lovable. Never mind the bright autumn leaf, the woodchuck on the rock, or the open cottage door. Look at the glory of light coming through thin clouds, the great lift of the sky, the splendid reflection of the water, the abiding beauty of color in the forests and hills.”

It is doubtful that Martin had any positive theory of art which he was trying to work out in practice. He probably painted instinctively or unconsciously toward a given goal, as most painters do. That he knew emphasis could be given certain features of landscape by suppressing other features is to say that he knew the old law of dramatic effect. But there is a shade of difference perhaps between negative suppression and positive assertion. To emphasize a certain quality or element by putting forward its most commanding feature was to characterize it and make it dominant. And that, I think, was Martin’s aim. He knew mountain fight, air, and color as few painters have known them; he knew the glamour of their poetry quite as well as the prose of their facts. From much knowledge andlong contemplation he had come to know the abiding character of mountain landscape. And when at last he had simplified his composition and his handling, it seemed an easy matter for him to put the characterization upon canvas. His remark to Mrs. Martin, “If I were quite blind now and knew just where the colors were on my palette I could express myself,” was not an empty boast.

This is perhaps reducing theories of painting to a very elementary basis. The formula prescribes merely an omission of what you do not care for and a strong characterization of the things you do care for. But as a matter of fact is that not the process common to most painters? The Meissoniers and Gérômes who paint the shoe-button and the eyelash do so because they love shoe-buttons and eyelashes just as Durand and Church loved birch bark and trailing ivy. Almost all of our early landscapists made no discrimination whatever in what they liked or disliked. A red sun in the background was of no more artistic importance than a red September maple in the foreground. They took nature in its entirety, omitting nothing, adding nothing. In result they produced something only a grade above the colored photograph. But Corot, Inness, Wyant, Martin had a more intelligent view-point. To them there were certain features of nature that were characteristic in their universality and permanence, andother features that were merely casual or accidental. The introduction of the merely casual they found did not lend to the characterization of the permanent, so they discarded it and threw their strength into that which signified the most.

What are the significant and permanent features in landscape? Well, above all is light—the first of created things, and to this latest day the most beautiful of nature’s manifestations. Corot spent his life painting it and even on his deathbed was raving about it in delirium. No wonder Martin was a great admirer of Corot, for he, too, was devoted to the splendor of light. In all of his later pictures it is a leading feature, and the eye is inevitably drawn at once to this beauty of the sky. He greatly disliked anything like a story in his landscapes or any literary climax dependent upon figures or houses or animals. They would detract from the tale of light and were discarded. Nature was beautiful enough by itself considered. No wonder he chose the uninhabited mountains for his subjects. They were not only devoid of humanity, but up there beyond the peaks was the most splendid manifestation of the light he loved—the pure mountain light.

What are the other abiding features of landscape? Well, shadow or half-light—light partially obscured by opaque bodies. It could be used as a contrast and by cunning application could be made to enhance the luminosity offull light. Moreover, interior depth and penetration could be obtained with it. Best of all, its uncertainty lent itself to suggestiveness and the mystery of things half seen. Inness was greatly in love with it. Many of his late canvases are called “vague” or sometimes “swampy,” because they are saturated with shadow masses out of which loom or glow mysteriously half-seen forms and colors. Martin made no such use of it as Inness, though many of his foregrounds are in shadow through which one looks to a lightened middle distance or sky. He was very fond of a light broken by being filtered through thin clouds, and he carried this out by employing a diffused thin shadow such as obtains under broken light. It is not often that one meets with dark shadows in his later pictures. He seemed to shy at anything like blackness, and in one of his pictures now in the Metropolitan Museum—the “View on the Seine”—the luminosity is so marked that the picture has the look of a water-color drawing. It was not the black and the “woolly” in Corot that he loved but the luminous and the radiant.

Another omnipresent and universal feature of landscape is color. It is an emanation of light, is, in fact, no more than its dispersed beams. If the light is direct and unclouded, the color will leap to very high pitches, such as we see in the landscapes of Inness or the Algerian scenes of Delacroix or Regnault or Fromentin; if thelight comes from below the horizon and is reflected down to earth from the upper sky, the color will be subdued in mellow tones of saffron, rose, and grays such as we see in the dawns of Corot; if the light comes from above the horizon at sunset and is filtered through filmy forms of cumulo-stratus clouds, the color will be delicate broken tones of gold, azure, sad grays such as we see in the “Honfleur Light” or the “Criquebœuf Church” of Martin. He revelled in these subdued tones of broken light. They were not only the eternal coloring of nature but they were the means wherewith he expressed his own sentiment or feeling about nature.

Still other and not less universal features of landscape to Martin were enveloping atmosphere which bound all things together and made harmony; space which lifted above the reach of the earth and was limitless; heave and bulge in the mountain ranges with continuity in their interblended lines and massive strength in their rock strata; a limitless expanse to the mountain forests; a splendid broken reflection from the surface of river, pond, and pool. These features appear in such different pictures as the “Lake Champlain,” the “Lake Sandford,” the “Adirondacks,” the “Normandy Farm,” the “Mussel Gatherers,” the “Haunted House,” the “Westchester Hills”—this last, perhaps, the simplest and the best of all.

hills“Westchester Hills,” by Homer D. Martin.In the Daniel Guggenheim Collection.(click image to enlarge)

“Westchester Hills,” by Homer D. Martin.

In the Daniel Guggenheim Collection.(click image to enlarge)

A final characteristic of nature may be notedbecause Martin seems to have known it well. It appears in almost all of his pictures, and is perhaps more pronounced with him than with any other landscape-painter. I mean nature’s great serenity. The word has been so carelessly used in criticism that one has difficulty in enforcing more than a careless meaning for it, and yet whatever of serenity there may be in fretful civilization or its art is merely a poor imitation of the eternal repose of nature itself. By that I imply nothing very profound. The mad plunges of Niagara, the explosions of Colima and Krakatoa, the inundation of tidal waves, or the shakings of earthquakes are mere accidents from which nature straightway recovers. The winds, the storms, the great sea-waves again are only momentary incidents. After they have passed, nature once more returns to herself. She is ruffled merely for a moment and then only in a small localized area. Her normal condition is repose—that immobility which we associate with the realms of space.

In the arts some attempt has been made to give this quality of supreme restfulness. The early Egyptians in their colossal Pharaonic statues attained a formal repose by the bulk and weight and hardness of the granite and the calm attitude of the figure seated in its great stone chair. The Parthenon as a building and the Phidian sculptures of the pediment, now in the British Museum, again have a poise and style not inaptly called restful. Once more in painting serenity has often been attributed to the landscapesof Claude and Corot and not without good reason. Martin liked that feature in both these landscape-painters. Standing before the paralleled and contrasted Claude and Turner in the National Gallery, he called George Chalmers’s attention to the serene dignity of the Claude and the fussiness and labored work of the Turner. But before ever he saw Turner or Claude or Corot, he was picturing this attribute of nature with marked effect. His critics and admirers called attention to the absence of anything dramatic in his art; they noticed that his landscapes were deserted of man, that they were silent, forsaken places with a solemn stillness about them. Nothing stirred in them; God and Martin only had seen them. But was not all this merely another way of describing nature’s eternal repose which Martin had grasped and pictured?

There is no stillness like that of a deserted church or a haunted house, and are not all Martin’s churches deserted and all his houses haunted? There is no hush like that of a mountain forest, and are not all his forests motionless? There is no rest like that of a mountain lake caught in a cup in the hills, and are not all Martin’s lakes still waters that throw back the reflection of serene skies? We speak of his poetry, of his sentiment and his feeling about nature, and these he had in abundance, but do we always credit him with a knowledge of nature’sprofundities? Had he not an intellectual grasp of the great elemental truths of nature, and was his art not largely a calm, supreme, and splendid exposition of those truths to mankind? A seer and a poet he was; but also a thinker. His long fallow periods when he did not, could not, paint were periods of intellectual reflection that brought forth after their kind an art which was at least unique.

Martin’s pictures never were very popular. During his life the great public passed them by and the picture-collector bought them only with caution and at very modest prices. It was to be supposed that after bravely living and dying in poverty his pictures would finally come into the market and sell at factitious prices. Such indeed has been the case. Some of them shortly after his death fetched over five thousand dollars apiece, and to meet an increased demand for them the genial forger came to the rescue. Spurious Martins were made and sold to picture-collectors until finally the scandal of it had an airing in open court.

What a commentary on an age and a people that would appreciate and patronize art! The real jewel lying unnoticed in the dust for years and then a quarrel in court over its paste imitation! Verily the annals of art furnish forth strange reading, and not the least remarkable page is the story of Homer Martin and his pictures.

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