American painting and its tradition

by John C. Van Dyke

“There is an austerity, a remoteness, a certain savagery in even the sunniest and most peaceful of his landscapes, which were also in him, and an instinctive perception of which had made me say to him in the very earliest days of our acquaintance that he reminded me of Ishmael.”

There is no contradiction of character in these two phases of Martin’s mentality. They argue merely versatility. He was exceedingly fond of the silent, even melancholy, beauty of nature, as he was of the solemn seriousness of fine poetry; but these were not themes for talk at the club. Mrs. Martin says she never heard him “talk shop” and that, with several notable exceptions such as La Farge and Winslow Homer, most of his close friends were people in other professions than painting. He never tabooed art as a topic of conversation, but he could talk on other themes quite as well. The mental facet that reflected him as a man of the world gave out a different light from that which proclaimed him a poet in landscape. His was not a one-facet mind.

What part heredity played in his equipment may only be guessed at. His father was a mild-mannered carpenter of New England descent, his mother a strong-willed, quick-witted woman belonging to an old Albany family. It is usually assumed that Martin derived from his mother and got his artistic instincts from her. These latter, it seems, developed early—the mother testifying that before he was two years old she was accustomed to quiet him by giving him pencil and paper. At five he did what has been called a “spirited” drawing of a horse. Doubtless every one can remember something of the same sort told about his own infancy. The drawing habit is common to almost all children and usually means little.

But Martin was to demonstrate shortly that he could do nothing else but draw and make pictures. At school in Albany (where he had been born in 1836) he was not a shining success. He said himself that his school-days had been spent in looking through the windows at the Greenbush Hills and longing for the time when he could get over there and draw them. At thirteen his schooling ended, much to his after regret. He then went into his father’s carpenter-shop, but that proved as little attractive as the schoolroom. A clerkship in a store ended disastrously owing to his non-recognition of the amenities of business life. Then he entered an architect’s office and failed there because of defective eyesight. He could not see or draw a vertical line properly. Later on he was eliminated from the Civil War draft because of this same defective vision. His special fitness for the painter’s craft was not very obvious at this time, and yet he was headed strongly that way.

It was E. D. Palmer, the sculptor, who persuaded the father to allow Martin to go on with art. Palmer was then the art oracle of Albany, with a little coterie of painters about him consisting of such men as James and William Hart, George H. Boughton, Edward Gay, Launt Thompson. Martin knew them as a boy; and, after sixteen, doing pretty much as he pleased, he frequented their studios, and for two weeks was a pupil of James Hart. That is the only direct instruction he ever received. Before he was twenty he had opened a studio of his own in Albany, was quite well known as a youthful prodigy, and was generally thought to have in him the making of an artist.

It was in Albany that he met and married in 1861 Elizabeth Gilbert Davis, a clever woman who afterward developed much literary ability and became well known not only as a reviewer in The Nation and other periodicals but as a novelist and magazine writer. The marriage was altogether fortunate and happy, though at times pecuniary difficulties incident to the artistic and literary life weighed heavily upon them. She was a rod and a staff to comfort him, and there is no record that she ever flinched or failed or regretted her choice. In their early married life there were few trials, she recording that they were fairly prosperous, that he received numerous commissions for pictures, and that they had made many friends. They had stayed on in Albany until the winter of 1862-1863, and then had moved to New York. In 1864 he had a studio in the Tenth Street Building, and his near neighbors were Sandford Gifford, Hubbard, Griswold, J. G. Brown, McEntee, Eastman Johnson, and, later, John La Farge.

This was a time of comparatively rapid production with Martin and also a time when many influences might be supposed at work upon him; but in reality none of the influences seems to have made much of an impression. His early work is now infrequently seen, but what there is of it, though small, bright, and a little crude, is nevertheless quite distinctly Martinesque. He had, of course, inherited from the Hudson River school (a name that Professor Mather declares Martin originated) the “view” in landscape. With the panorama had come down the studio method of small detailed treatment, and Martin at first paid it allegiance but he very soon saw its defects. As a boy he could speak of a picture by his master, James Hart, as “a scene of niggled magnitude,” and Mr. Brownell tells me that he had always talked much of “generalization” in landscape.

His early pictures show this generalization not so much perhaps in breadth of handling as in breadth of view. He was even then seeing the large elements of earth, air, water, and sky. Naturally enough, his brush was a little fussy with foliage, dead-tree trunks, rock strata, and foreground properties in general; but he could see the unity of mountain ranges, the continuity of air, the omnipresent radiance of light, the great heave of the sky. He already had the vision but not, as yet, the full means of revealing it. It was practically the same nature that Cole and Church had seen, but they saw it in its surface aspect, where Martin saw it in its depth. The difference between them was the wide difference that divides the superficial from the profound.

With his early pictures Martin had made considerable success. As far back as 1857 he had exhibited at the National Academy of Design; in 1868 he was elected an associate of the Academy, and in 1874 he was made a full academician. His landscape material at first had been gathered in the Berkshires, then he seems to have tramped and sketched with Edward Gay in the Catskills. In the early sixties he went to the White Mountains, and from 1864 to 1869 he was every summer in the Adirondacks. In 1871 he went to Duluth, Minnesota, at the invitation of Jay Cooke, but the next year found him in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. He was a mountain lover, almost exclusively so, at this time, and apparently not quite happy away from them.

Professor Mather, who has closely traced Martin’s career in a notable monograph,[3] says that his sketches in this early period were made with a hard pencil on sheets of gray paper. They were minutely done, drawn in outline, without color, and with no dash or smudge or mere suggestion about them. The pictures painted from them in his studio were perhaps less detailed than the sketches, and as for their color, he no doubt relied upon his visual memory or his instinct for tone and harmony. After 1876 he began to use charcoal in sketching, and later on he took up water-colors and made drawings with them along the Saguenay and elsewhere. Doubtless these later sketch mediums had come to him on his first trip abroad in 1876.