It was in Villerville also that he began the “Sand Dunes on Lake Ontario,” now hanging in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, with the intention of sending it to the Salon. But before it was completed he got into one of those hobbles which were not uncommon in his experience, when the more he tried to hurry the less he was in reality accomplishing. It was in no condition to be seen when the last day for sending came, as we both agreed, yet he sent it. Naturally enough, it was rejected. I think that result surprised him less than it momentarily annoyed him. He put the canvas aside and for months never touched it. But one day during the next season, while he was painting on it, a French landscapist and his wife came to call upon us. I forget his name. He studied it in silence for a long time. Then turning to me, he said: “Your husband’s work reminds me strongly of that of Pointelin. He must send this canvas to the next Salon.” “It has been there once,” said I, “and the jury rejected it,” adding, because of his evident surprise, “It was not then in its present condition.” “Nevertheless,” he replied, “I cannot understand a French jury rejecting such a picture in any state in which Mr. Martin would have sent it in at all.”
I do not remember just why we removed from Villerville. Perhaps because Homer was able to obtain in Honfleur a roomy and well-lighted studio apart from our dwelling-place, an arrangement which he always preferred. The little city from which William the Norman set out on his conquering expedition in 1066 had not the picturesque charm of the village we left, but possessed compensating features in the way of English and American neighbors. Our whole sojourn in France was, in fact, delightful, and perhaps even more so to me than to my husband. Through my mother there was a good deal of French blood in my veins, and in its ancestral environment it throbbed with a rhythmic atavism unknown elsewhere to my pulses.
I think that notwithstanding the excellent lighting arrangements of his studio, my husband did not complete much work in Honfleur. “The Mussel Gatherers,” to me one of the most impressive of his later canvases, was finished there, and though I do not recall another for the Artist Fund Sale, I suppose there must have been one. A never-completed studio interior with a portrait of me, and reproductions in miniature of the studies hanging on the walls; still another small portrait, a number of panels, one of which, “Wild Cherry Trees,” was in the Clarke Sale in 1897, and various water-colors belong likewise to this period. Meanwhile his note-books were filling up with material for future use.
I sailed for New York at the end of August, 1886, and Homer, who had remained to finish some of the things I have just named, followed me three months later, arriving December 12th of that year. In the following spring he secured one of the studios in Fifty-fifth Street, having previously utilized for that purpose a room with a north light in an apartment we had in Sixty-third Street. In his more convenient quarters he painted a few great pictures, among them the “Low Tide at Villerville,” the “Sun Worshipers,” and still another, the title of which I never knew, and which I never saw until much later, when going one day with the late Miss a’Becket to the Eden Musée,—I think to see something of her own in an exhibition then in progress, of paintings belonging to private owners,—this great canvas faced me on the line of the opposite wall, and startled me into the exclamation: “That must be one of Homer’s!” It was full of light and color. The land on the left sloped gradually down nearly to the middle of the foreground, and the wonderful sheet of water behind and beyond it that fairly rippled out of the frame, was dazzling. What he called it I do not know. To each other we never gave his landscapes any name, nor did he to any one else unless a purchaser required a title, or there was question of a catalogue. I think, however, that this canvas may be one which was completed in January, 1889, while I was in Toledo, and which was bought almost as soon as finished by Mr. Thomas B. Clarke. If so, it changed hands very soon, and was possibly taken away from New York. Homer wrote me at the time about the sale. From all I could learn of the Memorial Exhibition at the Century Club in the spring of 1897—an exhibition which, to my lasting regret, closed just before I was able to reach New York—this picture was not included in it.
TREES NEAR VILLERVILLE
Reproduced from the original water color in the collection of Mr. Wm. Macbeth
His last studio in New York—occupied from 1890 until he went to St. Paul in June, 1893—was in a house belonging to the Paulist Fathers and adjoining their Convent in Fifty-ninth Street. There he painted the “Normandy Trees,” the “Haunted House” I have already referred to as belonging to Dr. D. M. Stimson, the “Honfleur Lights” now owned by the Century Club, and began the “Criquebœuf Church,” afterward completed in St. Paul. In that house I first observed that his eyesight, always imperfect, was becoming still more dim. Never till then had I known him to ask any one to trace an outline for him. He thought, moreover, that some serious internal trouble threatened him, and consulted both an oculist and a physician. In the early summer of 1892, believing that an ocean voyage would benefit him, he availed himself of the opportunity afforded by the sale to the Century Club of the “Honfleur Lights” and sailed for the last time to England. He spent a very considerable part of his absence at Bournemouth, where resided the family of Mr. George Chalmers, friendship with whom must, I think, have been coeval with his entire life in New York, and lasted, on the part of the survivor, far beyond it. Concerning this visit, Mr. Chalmers wrote me a few years later, in reply to my request that he should tell me about it: “I do not feel that I can do Homer the justice he deserves. Certainly that visit greatly endeared him to me and to my wife, and even to our Harold, who was then a little mite, but who remembers him well. I wish I could remember some of Homer’s talk, always so charming, on our various outings during that happy time—especially about pictures, a subject with which he was eminently so familiar. Two visits to the National Gallery in London I recall in a general sort of way, to be sure. I remember how stirred he was as we stood before the two Turners in the National Gallery, presented by the artist on condition that they should be placed next to the Claudes. Homer regarded Turner’s challenging comparison with the great Frenchman as the sheerest audacity, and called attention to the fussiness and labored work of the Turners compared with the ease and serene dignity and splendor of the Claudes.”
Curiously enough, Mr. Chalmers arrived in New York from London the next day after my own arrival from St. Paul, in April, 1897, and took what I am sure could not have been altogether agreeable pains in order to render me a very important service.
During this last absence of my husband from America, I spent a part of my own vacation in Ottawa, and while there received a letter in which he asked me to write to the oculist who had examined him—I think it was Dr. Bull—and find out from him precisely what was the condition of his eyes. I did so, and received the painful verdict that the optic nerve of one of them was dead, while the other was partially clouded by a cataract. I mention these facts in order that my readers may get an adequate conception of the enormous difficulties under which his latest paintings were begun and finished. Among these is the autumnal known as “The Adirondacks,” exhibited at the Century Club Memorial Exhibition, and bought shortly afterward by Mr. Untermyer at the sale of Mr. T. B. Clarke’s collection. Looking at it when he was giving his final touches, I said to him: “Homer, if you never paint another stroke, you will go out in a blaze of glory!” “I have learned to paint, at last,” he answered. “If I were quite blind now, and knew just where the colors were on my palette, I could express myself.” Another belonging to this period is the “View on the Seine” already referred to, and which in an earlier stage was, to my mind, still more beautiful than it is at present. In its primitive condition—and, indeed, from the moment when it was first charcoaled on the canvas, the trees so grouped that they suggested by their very contour the Harp to which he was inwardly listening—it was supremely elegant. Elegance is still its characteristic feature, but I wish he had left it as I saw it first. “The trees were about four hundred feet high!” he objected, when I told him so, and I did not then, and do not now, see the force of the objection. It was a thing of beauty, anyhow, and who but a pedant measures those except by the optical illusion and spiritual impression they produce?