he could not live to complete his art. For he never believed in his
having reached a final goal, and was always changing, experimenting,
trying to better his work. My first meeting with him must have been in
1882. I seem to remember him seated before a picture with his palette
fastened to the easel, his right arm hanging rather limp, and his left
hand holding a brush. There was nothing noteworthy about the meeting
except that his first words were a request that I should tell him what
was wrong with the picture on the easel. He was so anxious to get a new
view-point that he was quite willing to listen to a stranger, whether
he spoke with authority or not. Of course I did not venture to say
anything other than in praise of the canvas, though as I now remember
it the picture was bothering him and looked a little tortured in its
surface.
He worried a good deal over many of his pictures. When Inness came in
to see him he relieved the strain in his impetuous way by taking up
Wyant’s palette and brushes to add a touch here and there. The result
usually was that the canvas grew into an Inness before the acquiescent
Wyant’s eyes. There was so much of this that Mrs. Wyant finally forbade
Inness her husband’s studio--at least that is the story told by the
Inness family. But Wyant would do anything, submit to anything, for the
love of painting. Bruce Crane writes me:
“How that man did love to paint! I often thought he worked too hard,
sometimes failing to get his breath between canvases. He wished
always to be alone so that he could paint, paint, not for praise nor
emolument; never with the thought of reward. I recall Z. visiting the
studio one day and remarking that he, Z, would like to be considered
the best landscape-painter in America. After he left, Wyant said: “What
a h---- of an ambition!”
Loving the mountains and the forests as he did, it was to be expected
that he would use them in art. It was his earliest inheritance and
his latest love. Any one at all familiar with the Adirondacks or the
Catskills will recognize in Wyant’s landscapes not their topography,
perhaps, but their characteristics. The valleys, the side-hills with
outcropping rock, the pines, beeches, and birches, the little streams
and pools, the clearings with their brush-edgings, are all there. Wyant
arranged them in his pictures with the skill of a Japanese placing
flowers in a pot. He made not so much of a bouquet as an arabesque
of trees and foliage, illuminated by sunlight filtered through thin
clouds at the back and warmed with golden-gray colors. Atmosphere--the
silvery-blue air of the mountains--held the pattern together, lent it
sentiment, sometimes (with shadow masses) gave it mystery.
Perhaps the best illustration of this in any public gallery is the
“Broad Silent Valley” in the Metropolitan Museum. It is doubtful if
Wyant ever expressed himself better or more completely than in this
picture. It is a large upright canvas, the very shape of which adds to
the dignity and loftiness of the composition placed upon it. At the
left are half a dozen large trees, at the right a rocky hillside,
in the central plane a reflecting pool of water, at the back a high,
clouded sky, radiant with the light beyond it. Simple in materials,
not brilliant in color but rather sombre in tones of golden gray,
devoid of any classic or romantic interest, it is nevertheless
profoundly impressive in its fine sentiment of light, air, and color.
It is as strong almost as a Rousseau in its foreground and trees, and
as charming as a Corot in its light and air. But you cannot detect
either Corot or Rousseau in it. When it was painted, Wyant was greatly
taken with those painters, but he did not imitate or follow them. His
pictures were always his own--the “Broad Silent Valley” not excepted.
The beauty and charm of its sentiment with the wonder of its strong
mental grasp are paralleled by the workmanship displayed. Looking
closely at the canvas, one finds it not heavily loaded, but dragged
broadly and laid flatly with pigment. The ground has been underbased in
warm browns, the shadows kept transparent and distant by glazes, the
lights put in with opaque pigments. The handling is very broad if thin,
and there has been little or no kneading or emendation or fumbling. It
is straightforward flat painting of a masterful kind. And this was done
with that late-trained left hand!
[Illustration: “Broad, Silent Valley,” by Alexander H. Wyant.
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.]
As for the drawing, it does not bother with the edges of objects,
but concentrates force on the body and bulk--the color mass. Wyant
had learned linear drawing with the exactness of a Durand and
used it in his early pictures, but he soon outgrew the fancy for
photographic detail. It was not effective. And he could give the
solidity of a ledge of rock or the lightness of a floating cloud much
better with a broader brush. As he grew in art his brush continued to
broaden. His work became more sketchy, his brush freer and fuller,
and possibly before he died he may have heard his work referred to as
“impressionistic”--heaven save the word!
The general public usually regards any breadth of brush-work whatever
as a sign of impressionism. The term in its present meaning, or lack
of meaning, covers a multitude of stupidities. Every one who paints
gives an impression because he cannot give anything else. Realism is a
misnomer. The real is nature itself, and art is the report about the
real made by the painter. If it is a minute report of surface detail
that can be seen through a magnifying-glass the public immediately
dubs it realistic; if it is a broad report that ignores the surface
detail for bulk, mass, and body, it is called impressionistic. But the
difference is merely between the smallness and the largeness of the
view-point. The great landscapists have usually regarded a tree as more
important in its shadow masses and volume than in its leaves, a rock
as more impressive in its weight than its veins or stains, a bar of
sunlight more striking in its luminosity than in its sharp-cut edges.
Seeing and painting that way it is easy to comprehend how they should
be set down as impressionists when in a large sense they are making
more faithful record than the men who see only the surface glitter.
Such men were Corot, Constable, Inness, Wyant, not to mention Manet or
Monet.
Wyant probably came to that point of view at first through Inness and
then, later on, through Constable, Corot, and Rousseau. It was the
right point of view, though he never gave it with quite the breadth
of Corot or with the solid painting of Rousseau. His canvases were
always sufficiently covered with pigment, but no more. Some of his
late pictures show a freer use of pigment, but he seldom if ever did
any fat or unctuous painting, and never painted for mere display of
dexterity. He had certain formulas of composition, methods of getting
certain effects that he employed continuously. For instance, he liked
a dark foreground, a lighted middle distance, and a veiled sunlight
effect at the back. To avoid the obviousness of this composition he
often introduced light spots from a pool in the dark foreground and
dark stumps or tree trunks in the light middle distance, or otherwise
varied the contrast of light with dark. But these with glazed shadows
and opaque high lights were not exactly painter’s tricks but rather the
conventional practices of the studio at that time.
Wyant up to the last ten years of his life painted much out of doors
and directly from the model. From that he got exact knowledge of forms,
lights, and colors, so that in after-years he was able to draw and
paint largely from visual memory. Working directly from the model led
him into much detail, and some of his earlier pictures are burdened
with a multitude of facts, but when he worked from memory in the studio
all that was changed. He simplified his composition to a few large
masses, threw out detail, and depended for effect largely upon light,
air, and diffused color. A little valley view with half a dozen beeches
at the left, a clump of bushes with a ledge of rock at the right, a
veiled distance--that was enough for him.
Occasionally in his pictures one sees a white cottage in the
background, a road or a bridge; but these do not occur frequently, and
I cannot remember any picture by him that shows man, woman, or child.
The human interest was not his. He believed that nature was sufficient
unto itself and needed no association with mankind to make it beautiful
or interesting. So long had he looked at nature and studied her
appearances, so long had he marvelled and brooded over her grandeur
and beauty, so long had he loved the veiled mountain light, the blue
air, and the forest shadow, that finally he came to have a way of
seeing things, a point of view about nature that by its intensity and
depth was perhaps abnormal. He saw not as we see but as an absorbed
nature-lover sees. The disturbing prose of facts was no longer there.
The poetry of light, air, and color alone remained.
In his first endeavors when he painted from the model he recited the
beauty of the facts and perhaps thought they would be sufficient to
carry the picture. Nature was beautiful in itself; if faithfully
transcribed on canvas why would not the beauty carry on into the
transcription? He found later on that it would not and could not, that
the counterfeit presentment remained only a counterfeit presentment.
Then he began to simplify his matter and broaden his method, seeking
not to reproduce the original but to give merely the feeling or
impression that the original had made upon him. The result was that
peculiarly poetic quality of light, air, and color that we associate
with such pictures as the “Broad Silent Valley.”
Of its kind no finer quality of pictorial poetry was ever produced than
is shown in Wyant’s later landscapes. It is not exactly epic, though
it has wonderful descriptive passages, sustained effect, and often
very positive strength of utterance. Lyric is the term that describes
it better. For it is a song rather than a recitation--a wood theme
worthy of a Pan’s piping, though it gives no hint of the Old World,
and belongs emphatically in this new Western land with its unbroken
soil and virgin forests. In aim and effect it is not unlike the pæan
in praise of light by Corot. They were both painter-poets--the one
painting on the outskirts of Paris, the other gathering his material on
the outskirts of civilization here in America.
Inness, Wyant, Homer Martin, Winslow Homer--no one ever questioned
the Americanism of their art. They are our very own--the product of
this new soil. Even their limitations recite our history. As for their
aspirations, with their passionate love for the beauty of our own
American landscape, may it not be fairly claimed that in these they are
representative of the American people? In a large sense have they not
been our pictorial spokesmen, saying in art what many of us have always
felt but could not well express?
And Wyant--Wyant with the wood-thrush note--well, we shall not look
upon his like again! For he and Martin were perhaps rarer spirits,
finer souls, than either Inness or Homer. Their charm of mood, the
serenity of their outlook, the loveliness of their vision will hardly
be repeated in our art. They marked an epoch and belonged to a past
that unfortunately is leaving no decided teaching or sequence in its
wake. The trend in art to-day is not toward serenity but turbulence.
IV
HOMER MARTIN
The little 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 rare _raconteur_ and 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 figure or 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 woman belonging 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 craft was
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 in _The Nation_ and 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 received numerous 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’s career 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 such essential 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 the hypercritical, 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 the _paysage intime_ of 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 agreed _in toto_ with a remark attributed 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.”