We were fairly prosperous in those early years, or might have been if we had been constituted differently. “There is much virtue in If.” Homer’s landscapes were often commissioned, and seldom remained long on his easel in any case after they were finished. But it was never possible to count on any definite term as that of their probable completion. He was a man of many moods, and that one of them in which he could paint and be satisfied after a fashion with what he painted, was the most irregular and uncertain of them all. He did not possess his genius but was possessed by it. His fallow periods were many. When they passed away, the first sign that seeds had begun to sprout again was often the entire scraping out of a landscape that to others had seemed to need only the final touches. I asked him once in later years, at a time when there was every need for exertion were it possible, why he did not paint. It was in 1881. “I cannot paint,” said he. “I do not know where the impulse comes from, nor why it stays away. All I know is that when it comes I can do nothing else but paint; when it goes I can do nothing but dawdle.” That was absolutely true. It was also very inconvenient.

But in that earlier period with which I am still concerned, his pictures for years brought him an income which averaged between two and three thousand dollars, sometimes more than that. It was war-time and after. Prices were high for everything. Money came at irregular intervals, often so prolonged that, when it did come, it had to be chiefly employed in the process he once described as “mopping up debts;” a kind of industry to which he found me persistently addicted. Neither of us took as much thought for the morrow as perhaps we might have done had not the morrows themselves seemed so uncertain a quantity. Life used to present itself to me at that time as a narrow path leading between precipices, across turbulent brooks, over stones that were slippery as well as sharp, and whose end was nowhere in sight. In fact, it never did become visible until, turning at some unexpected angle, our cul-de-sac would prove to have had a hidden outlet after all. Perhaps this was why our frequently recurring difficulties troubled us more and taught us less than they might have done under different circumstances. In the complex of life we ourselves were circumstances. Once, in later years, he casually remarked that I had never given him a chance to get tired of me, because he never knew what I would do next. Can any one give what one has not got?

ON THE HUDSON

Reproduced from the original painting through the courtesy of John M. Robertson, Esq.

Meantime, we found life entertaining as well as perplexing and difficult. Our little boys were healthy, intelligent and good-tempered. Homer’s work, when he could once settle down to it, was always able to divert his mind from every other preoccupation. I had been writing book reviews occasionally ever since the early spring of 1861 for the “Leader,” to which paper an article of mine concerning Mrs. Rebecca Harding Davis’s first novel had been sent under a pseudonym by the brother I have already referred to, who was a friend of that eccentric genius, Henry Clapp. Later on, I wrote once in a while for the “Round Table,” and, after some date in 1866, when Auerbach’s “On the Heights” was sent me from the “Nation” editorial rooms for review, pretty steadily for that periodical. Our friends were interesting to both of us. If Homer ever “talked shop,” at least I never heard him, and the men whose company he instinctively sought were never painters; or, since I must make an exception in the case of John La Farge, they were never merely that. He had a great capacity for love, and the two men whom he loved best were critics in the large sense: John Richard Dennett, from the first time they met until his untimely death in 1874; and William C. Brownell from that period, or perhaps before it, until the end.

Painting was his own sole means of adequate expression. Perhaps I ought not to say that. I may not be an adequate judge, and certainly I have heard great things about his reputation as a talker at the Century Club. But to me, from first to last, he never talked about impersonal subjects—perhaps because he could not consider anything that affected me in a purely impersonal light. I always read aloud to him a great deal, but the books and topics which interested me most after 1870 never interested him at all. Until then we had both been turning our intellectual searchlights in every conceivable intellectual direction. At that period mine steadied on its proper centre and veered no more. But to the very end I continued to read to him whatever he desired to hear.

Nevertheless, even though he was too many-sided not to find issue in more than one direction, his pictures are the only permanent result of his imperative need for self-expression. He always detested what he called literary pictures—pictures, that is, that told or tried to tell a story. And yet I think it true to say that if he is supreme as a colorist it is largely because color was to him an instrument, not an end. He used it as a poet uses words. He made it reflect not so much what is obvious in nature as that duplex image into which external nature fused itself with him, who was also a part of nature. To me, this is what individualizes his pictures. I think it impossible to mistake them. When he was in England the second time, I went to the art rooms of Mr. Lanthier, whom I had authorized to obtain from William Schaus a landscape I had never seen, and which had been for some months tucked away in an upper room inaccessible to visitors. I, at least, had been refused a sight of it when I went to the Schaus gallery for that purpose. The attendant told me they did not exhibit American pictures. Lanthier obtained possession of it, and when I saw it I remarked that, as usual, it was unsigned. “Unsigned!” protested he. “It is signed from the top of the canvas to the bottom. No one in the world could have painted it but Homer Martin.” He sold it a few days later to Mr. Sidney de Kay, whose family, I believe, still possesses it.

Homer went abroad for the first time in 1876, in company with the late Dr. Jacob S. Mosher, an Albany friend of both of us since before our marriage, and at that period quarantine physician of the port of New York. They went to France and Holland, perhaps to Belgium, as well as to England. How far they penetrated into France I do not remember, but I do recall—though when Mr. Charles de Kay wrote to ask the question some three years since I had forgotten—that they visited Barbizon and probably some of the painters whose classic ground it was, and that Homer made some pencilings both there and at Saint-Cloud. They were absent for some considerable time, and it was at this period that he made acquaintance with the late James McNeill Whistler.