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 for _Scribners
Monthly_[4] to do some illustrations for an article on that place, and
in 1881 he was sent to England by the _Century 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 the _Century_ people 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 last trip 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.
[Illustration: “View on the Seine,” by Homer D. Martin.
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.]
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 almost from 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 was bothered 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 and long 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, and other 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 of full 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 the light 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.
[Illustration: “Westchester Hills,” by Homer D. Martin.
In the Daniel Guggenheim Collection.]
A final characteristic of nature may be noted because 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 landscapes of 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’s
profundities? 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.
V
WINSLOW HOMER
I never had more than a nodding acquaintance with Winslow Homer.
Several times at opening nights of the National Academy of Design or
elsewhere, there was a word of greeting or comment but no more. He sent
me, in 1893 or thereabouts, a signed copy of a reproduction of his
“Undertow,” and letters were exchanged about it; but nothing noteworthy
was in the letters. My impression about him, if I had one, was perhaps
not different from that of his contemporaries. He was always thought
a diffident, a taciturn, even at times a brusque, person--one who
preferred his own silence to any one else’s loquacity. Chase once
remarked that he would thank no one for entertainment because he liked
his own art better than any one’s society, but that was mere scorn he
was just then flinging out at a Philistine millionaire. The remark
would fit Homer much better. For Homer lived it and Chase did not.
Much of Homer’s brusqueness of manner found its way into his art. There
is no grace or charm or polish about it. The manner of it repels rather
than wins one. The cunning, the adroit, the insinuating are hardly ever
apparent, but in their place we have again and again the direct, the
abrupt, the vehement. He states things without prelude or apology in a
harsh, almost savage, manner, and the chief reason why we listen to him
is that he has something to say. He has seen things in nature at first
hand and his statement about them brings home fundamental truths to
us with startling force. There is no sentiment or feeling in or about
the report. The man never falls into a revery as Martin, or a mood as
Wyant, or a passion as Inness. He is merely a reporter and is concerned
only with the truth. But it is a very compelling truth that he shows us.
He came out of Boston, where in 1836 he was born of New England
parents. His father was a hardware merchant and his mother a Maine
woman who is said to have had a talent for painting flowers. The
inference has been that the son got his first fancy for painting from
his mother, though one can hardly imagine anything farther removed from
Homer’s liking than the anæmic flower-painting of New England ladies in
the 1840’s. On the other hand, his grandfathers had been seafaring men
and it is quite possible that he inherited from them that love for the
sea that developed in his later life. But then it is difficult to make
out that Homer derived anything from any one. He seems to have just
grown rather than developed from a stalk or stock.
When he was six his family moved to Cambridge; and thereabouts, in
the woods and streams, he hunted, fished, and developed a love for
out-of-door life that never left him. There, too, he went to school and
put forth his first drawings. There is a drawing extant, done when he
was eleven years old, called the “Beetle and the Wedge”[6]--a drawing
of boys at play--that Kenyon Cox praises highly, saying that “the
essential Winslow Homer, the master of weight and movement, is already
here by implication.” It is certainly a remarkable drawing, for it
shows not only observation but skill of hand beyond a boy of eleven.
Moreover, one is rather surprised at the economy of means employed.
It is done easily, with a few strokes, as though the boy-artist had
unusual knowledge of form.
[6] Published in Downes, _Life and Works of Winslow Homer_, Boston,
1911.
The father was evidently pleased with the son’s after-efforts, for at
nineteen the youth was apprenticed to a Boston lithographer by the
name of Bufford. He started at work without any lessons in drawing and
was soon making designs for title-pages of sheet-music and working
somewhat upon figures. A wood-engraver named Damereau gave him some
hints about drawing on the block, and in the two years that he remained
with Bufford he must have picked up much information about drawing for
illustration, for at twenty-one he had set up a shop of his own and
was making illustrations for _Ballou’s Pictorial_, _Harper’s Weekly_,
and other periodicals.
The experience as an illustrator no doubt taught him exact observation,
precision in outline drawing, conciseness in statement, and the value
of the essential feature. So impressive was this early education that
it remained with him and influenced him to the end. He was always an
observer and an illustrator. One of his canvases left unfinished at
his death, “Shooting the Rapids,” now in the Metropolitan Museum, is
primarily an illustration of Adirondack life. It is something more,
to be sure, but the point to be noted just here is that the early
inclination was never wholly changed. He never became subjective, never
intentionally put himself into any of his works. He merely reported
what he saw from the point of view of an illustrator.
He came to New York to live in 1859 and attended the night classes at
the Academy of Design. There he no doubt improved his drawing. It is
said that he also received instruction from Rondel, a Frenchman, and in
the Paris Exposition of 1890 he was catalogued as a “pupil of Rondel”;
but there must have been some jest behind it, for Homer received only
four lessons from Rondel. He was not the man to take lessons from any
one. From the beginning he was too self-reliant, too self-centred, to
be led very far afield by another’s method or opinion.
In 1860, while still a very young man, he exhibited at the Academy of
Design his picture called “Skating in Central Park.” The next year he
went to Washington to prepare drawings for Lincoln’s inauguration; and
the year following he was the special war-artist of _Harper’s Weekly_
with McClellan in the Peninsular Campaign. His first war-picture done
in oils is said to be a “Sharp-Shooter on Picket Duty.” It was soon
followed by “Rations,” “Home, Sweet Home,” and “The Lost Goose”--two of
them shown at the Academy of Design in 1863. The next year he sent “The
Briarwood Pipe” and “In Front of the Guard House.” In 1865 he was made
an academician for his picture called “The Bright Side,” and shortly
afterward his very popular painting “Prisoners from the Front” was
shown.
There is nothing remarkable about any of these works. “The Bright
Side,” which won Homer the title of N.A., shows some negro soldiers
sprawling on the sunny side of an army tent. Like “Rations” and
“Prisoners from the Front,” it is just a passable illustration that
if made to-day would run small risk of applause. We wonder over the
achievement of Homer’s later years, but one is not sure that the lack
of achievement in his earlier years is not the more surprising. How
could he do such commonplace little pictures! Occasionally something
like “Snap the Whip,” which has large drawing comes in to break the
monotony; but the dull trend is soon resumed. His audiences and editors
must have been decidedly uncritical or else extremely good-natured.
And at this time Homer had practically finished with his apprenticeship
to art. He was thirty years old and had already developed aloofness,
not to say taciturnity. He kept much by himself, would not look at
other people’s pictures or discuss them, would not take advice from any
one. This was not because his head had been turned by his popularity;
but possibly because he thought he could work out better results alone
than with the aid of others. In spite of a little noisy success, he
must have known that his paintings up to this time were of small
importance. They were hard in drawing, brick-like in color, cramped in
handling. Their illustrative quality and the fact that Homer did them
are the only interesting things about them to-day.