By Homer D. Martin.
are grandly modelled; strength, solidity, and bulk, contrasted with the tremulous throbbing of the light. This contrast of rude, tawny ground with the vibration of a white sky recalls a favourite theme of the French painter Pointelin; but one feels that a comparison of his pictures with the “Westchester Hills” is all in favour of the latter. Both painters have felt the solemn loneliness of nature folding her strength in sleep, the mystery of darkening and of the lingering spirituality above; but Martin is the grander draughtsman of the two, suggesting with far more convincingness the solid structure of the earth. So we are made to realize that the phenomenon is not merely one that he has noted or that we might note, but one that through countless ages has manifested itself as part of the order of the universe.
Its significance is elemental. We may attribute this to the better drawing, or, with far more justice, to the superiority of intellect, that could embrace this larger conception and find the means to express it. And in studying the means let us not overlook the essential grandeur of the colour; not of the brave or passionate kind, but sober with a concentration of subtle meaning, that discovers infinite expression in the minutest variations of the homely browns and yellows, which in the shadow yield nothing but their strength and quietude. And, then, what a wonder of suggestion in the sky! It is not only lighted, but quivering with light; an elastic fluid that extends as far as one’s imagination can travel, in height, and breadth, and depth. These limitless skies are a characteristic of Martin’s pictures. He does not seem to have been attracted so much by cloud forms or to have been given, as it were, to building castles in the air; but his imagination loves to free itself in the far stretches of ether, the circumambient medium through which the waves of light travel. His skies are brushed in with firm assurance; it is a pleasure to peer into the canvas and study the sweep and exultation of the strokes, and then to step back until distance blends them into a unity of ranging grandeur. And just as Corot said of himself, that he was “like a lark pulsing forth its songs amid the gray clouds,” and his skies have the vibrative quality of violin music, so there is music in these skies of Martin’s, only it is that of the organ and the diapason stop. True, the note is not always so full and sonorous; as, for example, in the “View on the Seine” in the Metropolitan Museum, where the splendid blue and white have a more silvery resonance, which, however, is less suggestive of songfulness than of the sweep of music travelling on and on. Indeed, in all his skies, there is less of local significance than of the suggestion that the ether is a tidal ocean connecting the fragment of circumstance with infinity.
This landscape also shows that his imagination was not wedded to the solemn. It is brisk with the joie de vivre, and yet not in a merely sprightly way. In the line of poplars on the right of the picture, each spiring up into the sky, there is the sense of springing aspiration. Again, in that beautiful “Adirondack Scenery,” with its waves of brilliant foliage rolling between the brow, on which we feel ourselves standing, and the distant cliffs of mountains, what exuberance of spiritual joy! Spiritual, indeed, for the picture was painted far away in the West, indoors, and under the affliction of failing health. But who would guess it from the picture? Martin had so possessed himself of the sweetness and majesty of the Adirondacks, that he could give out from himself, drawing upon the treasures of his memory. It was his swan song, and how characteristic of the essential nobility of the man, that it breathes such ample serenity, such a boundless sense of beauty, pure, spacious, and enduring! He never dwelt upon his troubles, as smaller men do; and this last picture is a grand assertion of the supremacy of mind over matter,—a poet’s triumphant proof that his dream of beauty was strong within him to the last.
Martin’s work, like that of other great men, was uneven in quality. But if it lacks at times perfect intelligibility of construction or of form, it was not from want of knowledge or ability to draw, as is abundantly proved by the superlative excellence of these very qualities in his finest pictures. He had made countless studies, drawn with the greatest care, revealing a thorough feeling for and comprehension of form. At times, he may have found a difficulty in translating his knowledge into paint. His use of the brush, used as he needed to use it to express what he had in mind, had been necessarily self-acquired, and often it was rather the subtlety of the effect he desired to express than any fractiousness of the brush, which caused him to fumble, though, in the majority of his work, never sufficiently to distress us or to divert attention from the message that his picture conveys. For always, in his best pictures, there is this distinction of a message; not a mere friendly interchange of views between the painter and his friend, or simple, easy platitude regarding nature’s beauty, but a deep, strong, personal assertion of some specific truth of beauty, fundamentally and enduringly true. It is the sort of message that appeals to the depth and
From the collection of Samuel Untermeyer, Esq.
OLD CHURCH IN NORMANDY.