Fifty-Eight Paintings by Homer D. Martin (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from Fifty-Eight Paintings by Homer D. Martin
Th...)
Excerpt from Fifty-Eight Paintings by Homer D. Martin
The broad and placid waters of the lake fill the fore ground. The shores, low beyond the distant farther end, where the lake is narrow, spread out on either hand as the lake widens, and vanish from the picture near the middle distance. The season is autumn and the trees around the lake's borders are a rich brown, warming toward red. On the right the trees, growing thickly in their forest, rise on low mounds, and the taller ones raise their heads above the forestsmass like towering sentinels. On the left, dense growths of trees line the border of the water, a few tall pines being conspicuous near at hand. Farther back along the left, above the forest at the water's edge, the lofty moun tain peaks arise, here brown, yonder paling to a dis tant bluishsgreen. But above all is the wondrous sky one of the finest ever put in paint, it seems. In won: derfill aerial perspec'tive are the tumbling, rolling, floating masses - solid, yet light as their substance suggests - glowing in sunset reflections - white, gray, creamysyellow, rose:kissed - again taking a smoky hue - in a pale blue sky. The light in them is strong: est over the mountain tops, and refledtions of the clouds and woods appear in the rippling mirror of the lake.
Formerly in the collection of the late Dr. Fessenden N. Otis, who obtained it from the artist.
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Homer Dodge Martin was an American landscape painter.
Background
Homer Dodge Martin was born on October 28, 1836 in Albany, New York. His father Homer Martin, a carpenter, was of good plain New England stock; his mother, Sarah Dodge, was of an old Albany family and better educated. The desire to draw and make pictures manifested itself in his early boyhood. After a trial in his father's shop, and episodes as a clerk in a store and as a draftsman in an architect's office, young Martin, encouraged by the venerable sculptor Erastus D. Palmer, was allowed to follow his bent.
Education
Aside from a few weeks of instruction from the landscape painter James MacDougal Hart, Martin was self-schooled.
Career
At sixteen he was making a modest living from the sale of little landscapes of the lake and mountain scenery of New York and New England, pictures which were often garish in color and feebly slicked up, but already remarkably tasteful as compositions. He followed Thomas Cole's predilection for wild scenery and large spaces. For a matter of twenty years he tramped the Adirondacks, the Catskills, the Berkshires, and the White Mountains, bringing back sheaves of pencil sketches usually touched with white on tinted paper, very dry in method, but accurate in form and compositionally excellent. This constituted much of his apprenticeship, and after 1870 he sketched little. In 1857, at twenty-one, he exhibited two Connecticut landscapes at the National Academy. Martin was headed for a larger field, and after an essay in New York, in 1862 and 1863, as the studio mate of James Smillie, in 1865 he moved his family to the metropolis. He got ahead, had his passing mention in Tuckerman's Book of the Artists (1867) and the next year was elected an associate of the National Academy. In 1866 an election to the Century Club had made him free of the best literary and artistic society of the town, but his Bohemian and convivial tastes made him offish to those general social relations which were almost essential to any financial success. Meanwhile his style had changed perturbingly. Under a closer study of nature and observation of good pictures the tight handling loosened up, instead of the conventional browns, recondite colors appeared, the compositions were simplified, with much elimination of needless detail. No American painter, with the exception of George Inness and John La Farge, was painting so well in landscape, but Martin's difference and distinction passed for eccentricity, and his patronage fell off. And the harmony of his home was at least qualified by his wife's conversion to Roman Catholicism, he himself being an agnostic. This is the period of the "Lake Sanford, " in the Century Club, and the first pictures of the sand dunes on Lake Ontario, pictures grandly spacious and fraught with a noble melancholy. Within three years he made the firm friendship of John Richard Dennet of the Evening Post, and of William C. Brownell, the future critic. Among artists he saw few but Winslow Homer and John La Farge, whose studios were in the same building as his. And although the National Academy elected him to full membership in the seventies, he remained somewhat of an outsider a position enhanced by his incorrigible, witty, and sometimes bitter tongue, as it was by his personal disfigurement in a permanently inflamed nose. In 1876 a trip to England brought him the friendship of Whistler and the sight of fine pictures. The few pictures painted in the three or four following years, perhaps somewhat under Whistler's influence, are of great refinement in handling and tonality. "Andante, Fifth Symphony" a forest brook opening gracefully into a pool an eloquent record of Martin's musical enthusiasms, is perhaps the finest picture of this period, and the culmination of what may be called the American Martins. Practically none of the pictures of this period, which some prefer to the more popular canvases later painted in France, have found their way into museums. To eke out an always poor living, Martin had occasional recourse to illustration. It was paradoxically this gift that was to bring him the few years of tranquillity he ever enjoyed and the fulfillment of his genius. In Scribner's Monthly for February 1879 appeared certain illustrations made at Concord for Frank B. Sanborn's "The Homes and Haunts of Emerson. " These with other cuts figured in The Homes and Haunts of Our Elder Poets, by Sanborn and others. The success of this venture incited the Century to send Martin to England to sketch in George Eliot's country. The immediate results of this expedition may be seen in Rose G. Kingsley's article in the Century for July 1885. The ulterior and unexpected results were an excursion to Normandy, in 1882, to visit an illustrator friend, William John Hennessy. By the winter of 1882 the Martins were settled at Villerville, on the estuary of the Seine, and there or at neighboring Honfleur they stayed for some four years. There were occasional trips to Paris, but generally the Martins let friends come to them. For the first time Martin caught the penetrating charm of a more intimate scenery, immemorially inhabited and cultivated. His scale is no longer panoramic but intimate. His method grows richer. There is more body of paint, more carefully adjusted flicks of tone to make the surface "twinkle. " Possibly he was being influenced by that moderate impressionist, Boudin, who was painting in the same region.
Some of Martin's most famous pictures were painted, or at least begun, in these years: "The Church at Criqueboeuf, " "Mussel Gatherers, " "Low Tide Villerville, " "Ontario Sand Dunes, " and "Blossoming Trees. " But the finest fruits of this experience were characteristically garnered in after years in America. He drew at will from recent Norman memories or from American memories of his young manhood. To celebrate his return he finished "Sand Dunes, Lake Ontario, " begun in France, painted "The Sun Worshippers, " and that gravest of his American subjects, "Westchester Hills. " Nothing much sold. The family moved uncomfortably from lodging to lodging. To the early nineties belong such masterpieces as "Honfleur Light, " "Criqueboeuf Church, " the "Old Manor, " and "View on the Seine. " Still little sold except as groups of friends now and then bought a picture for a club or a museum. His eyesight grew so feeble that the contour had to be drawn for him on the canvas. His wife's nerves broke, and she took refuge late in 1892 with their eldest son Ralph at St. Paul. Within a few months he followed her. Then in an isolation he had never known he finished the "View on the Seine, " the "Normandy Farm, " and "Adirondack Scenery, " perhaps his richest work. By the early days of 1896 it was clear that he had cancer of the throat. He lived on for a year, still worked, was cheered by the unexpected and favorable sale of a picture, and died in February 1897 in St. Paul.
Achievements
Poet as much as painter, drawing from the contemplation of nature a gentle soothing and noble melancholy, Martin is the most distinguished American artist in that imaginative tradition of landscape panting which was splendidly inaugurated by Thomas Cole. Within a few years of his dying deeply in debt his erstwhile unsalable masterpieces had become the sensation of the art market and he received the posthumous honor of being forged.
With an eminently contemplative talent, he was at his best when working from remote and well matured memories. The Norman idyll closed with Mrs. Martin's decision to resume the struggle in America. By the new year of 1887 they were again in New York. At fifty Martin was already breaking. His eyesight, always defective, grew progressively worse. But he had nine amazing years before him still. His command of his mood and of his material was now complete. Martin was a painter of sentiment. He lacked the vigorous construction of Inness in his best estate and of Winslow Homer.
Connections
On June 21, 1861, he married Elizabeth Gilbert Davis, a young woman of cultivation and ability, whose facile pen for years helped out the always scanty family budget. She was one of the early reviewers for the Nation.
