It was in the Museum studio that I first saw Homer Martin. It was not until long afterward that I learned—and not from him—that having seen me in the street, he deliberately sought acquaintance with my eldest brother, like himself a lover of music and a frequenter of the local Philharmonic Society. An invitation to visit the studio and bring his sisters soon followed. To the end of his days, I suppose, Homer had reticences of that sort with me. At the time I speak of he was already locally known as a colorist of no mean capacity and a man of genius. I had heard his name, but only in connection with that of a dear friend and schoolmate of my own, a beautiful, golden-haired little creature, with a voice as delightful as her person, whom he was said to be following everywhere she went. They never met until after our marriage, which preceded her own.
I went one afternoon with my brother to see his pictures and his studio. The latter struck me as the most untidy room I had ever entered. I remember his rushing to throw things behind a large screen. I was not used to paintings. Such as I had seen had seemed to me mere daubs to which any good engraving would be altogether preferable. But on that afternoon there was a large unfinished landscape on the easel, which even to my unpractised eye conveyed the promise of beauty. It was a commission, painted for a Mr. Thomas of Albany, if I do not mistake. There were two great boulders lifting their heads out of a shallow foreground brook, and one day, much later, when I was there, he painted his own initials on one of them and mine on the other, but—as was always his habit when he remembered to sign his pictures at all—in tints differing so slightly from that of the surface on which he inscribed them as to be scarcely distinguishable from it.
THE DUNES
Reproduced from the original water color in the collection of Mr. Wm. Macbeth
We were married in my father’s house during the first year of the Civil War, on the twenty-fifth of June, 1861, and went off the same day to Twin Lakes, Connecticut. I still have the first sketch in oils which he made out-of-doors that season: a barley-field, meadow land in the middle distance, gray-green trees beyond. Two or three brown boulders, others merely penciled in, lie on the left of the foreground. The delicate heads of grain are swaying in a light breeze. Perhaps he did not do much in the way of visible work that summer. At all events, I do not now recall any. But in some subsequent winter he embodied his recollections of the place and time in a delightful landscape. All his life long, I think, his results were arrived at more by means of a slow, only half deliberate absorption when out-of-doors than by a wilful effort to record them at the time. Yet the one exception to that statement which I distinctly recall is a very great one: the Westchester Hills, which is thought by many to be his most perfect landscape. It was painted entirely en plein air, and many a day I sat close by, reading aloud or knitting while it was in progress. He never got so much as an offer for it, nor was it until more than two years after his death that a purchaser was found sufficiently venturesome to end a long hesitation by paying $1,000 to obtain it. He was presently rewarded for his temerity, I am happy to say, for when he put it up at auction a few months later, it brought him $4,750. The second purchaser was still more fortunate, reselling it for $5,300.
Neither of us ever revisited Twin Lakes. Later in the season we went to the farmhouse of Mr. Thaddeus Dewey, near Fort Ann, N. Y., where we remained until late in the autumn.
My husband retained his Albany studio until the winter of 1862-63, when he went to New York and for some months painted in the studio of Mr. James Smillie. It could hardly have been earlier than the winter of 1864-65 that after many efforts he succeeded in finding an empty studio in the Tenth Street Studio Building—a little, skylighted room on the top corridor which he occupied continuously until he resigned it before sailing for England the second time in the fall of 1881. His forty-fifth birthday came while he was on shipboard. I followed him to London in the succeeding June.
His nearest neighbors in the Studio Building for many years were Sanford R. Gifford, Richard Hubbard, C. C. Griswold, and J. G. Brown. Jervis McEntee and his charming wife were on the corridor next below; so was Julian Scott. Eastman Johnson and Launt Thompson were on the ground floor. I think that John La Farge must have come a little later. At any rate, I do not remember him before the winter of 1867-68. Failing, as often happened, to find my husband in his own studio, I went one day to that of Mr. La Farge on the same corridor in search of him. He was not there either, but I still retain a very distinct recollection of Mr. La Farge, face and characteristic attitude of doubtful welcome for intruders quickly changing as he divined my identity, asked me to enter, and so began a friendship still unbroken. Of course, Homer had talked a good deal to me about him. Certain questions which had been pressing on my mind with increasing persistence ever since my father’s death in 1866, very speedily found expression in a sort of personal catechism concerning his hereditary faith which he, perhaps, may likewise recall.