“View on the Seine,” by Homer D. Martin.
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
(click image to enlarge)
It was in these latter years only that Martin said that at last he had learned how to paint. Mrs. Martin had been lauding a picture called “The Adirondacks,” saying that if he never did another stroke he would go out in a blaze of glory, and it was his answer to her. He probably meant by the remark that he had arrived at a method of handling that fully expressed his thought. In reality it was the same old method, only it had been broadened and simplified. Except in his very early works, Martin had never been given to excessive surface detail. He painted with a comparatively broad brush almost from the start—painted with a flat stroke rather than with a stippling point. The “White Mountain” picture in the Metropolitan Museum, painted in 1868, shows substantially the same brush-work as the “Lake Ontario Sand Dunes” of nearly twenty years later. The sand-dunes picture seems to have been done largely with a palette-knife. Apparently it is trowelled across the canvas, with one tone or color laid over another, flattened down, compressed, blended. This applies especially to the sky; only the dead trees in the foreground are painted with a brush. In the “View on the Seine,” also in the Metropolitan Museum, the foliage and rocks are painted with the brush, but, again, the sky and water seem laid down in layers of paint, put on in long bands, and flattened to a lacquered surface. These bands of color in the sky, superimposed one upon another like platings of glass in a La Farge window, appear again in the “Honfleur Light.” All the hues seem blended by superimposition to produce a golden opalescent glow in the sky. Mrs. Martin said he used colors as a poet does words, and here, no doubt, he was getting orchestration in his sky by fusing many colors together.
But back of the method was the point of view which perhaps unconsciously begat the method. Martin always had a fancy for the great, the essential, elements of nature. And he saw things in their large relations, but at first was bothered by their protrusive and petty facts. When finally he came to paint only what he loved and let the rest go, he arrived at full expression. To paint space, air, pervasive light, color—to paint these alone—was to emphasize them, to characterize them by isolation, as though the painter should say: “I mean you to look only at the things I love and you shall see that they are lovable. Never mind the bright autumn leaf, the woodchuck on the rock, or the open cottage door. Look at the glory of light coming through thin clouds, the great lift of the sky, the splendid reflection of the water, the abiding beauty of color in the forests and hills.”
It is doubtful that Martin had any positive theory of art which he was trying to work out in practice. He probably painted instinctively or unconsciously toward a given goal, as most painters do. That he knew emphasis could be given certain features of landscape by suppressing other features is to say that he knew the old law of dramatic effect. But there is a shade of difference perhaps between negative suppression and positive assertion. To emphasize a certain quality or element by putting forward its most commanding feature was to characterize it and make it dominant. And that, I think, was Martin’s aim. He knew mountain fight, air, and color as few painters have known them; he knew the glamour of their poetry quite as well as the prose of their facts. From much knowledge and long contemplation he had come to know the abiding character of mountain landscape. And when at last he had simplified his composition and his handling, it seemed an easy matter for him to put the characterization upon canvas. His remark to Mrs. Martin, “If I were quite blind now and knew just where the colors were on my palette I could express myself,” was not an empty boast.
This is perhaps reducing theories of painting to a very elementary basis. The formula prescribes merely an omission of what you do not care for and a strong characterization of the things you do care for. But as a matter of fact is that not the process common to most painters? The Meissoniers and Gérômes who paint the shoe-button and the eyelash do so because they love shoe-buttons and eyelashes just as Durand and Church loved birch bark and trailing ivy. Almost all of our early landscapists made no discrimination whatever in what they liked or disliked. A red sun in the background was of no more artistic importance than a red September maple in the foreground. They took nature in its entirety, omitting nothing, adding nothing. In result they produced something only a grade above the colored photograph. But Corot, Inness, Wyant, Martin had a more intelligent view-point. To them there were certain features of nature that were characteristic in their universality and permanence, and other features that were merely casual or accidental. The introduction of the merely casual they found did not lend to the characterization of the permanent, so they discarded it and threw their strength into that which signified the most.
What are the significant and permanent features in landscape? Well, above all is light—the first of created things, and to this latest day the most beautiful of nature’s manifestations. Corot spent his life painting it and even on his deathbed was raving about it in delirium. No wonder Martin was a great admirer of Corot, for he, too, was devoted to the splendor of light. In all of his later pictures it is a leading feature, and the eye is inevitably drawn at once to this beauty of the sky. He greatly disliked anything like a story in his landscapes or any literary climax dependent upon figures or houses or animals. They would detract from the tale of light and were discarded. Nature was beautiful enough by itself considered. No wonder he chose the uninhabited mountains for his subjects. They were not only devoid of humanity, but up there beyond the peaks was the most splendid manifestation of the light he loved—the pure mountain light.
What are the other abiding features of landscape? Well, shadow or half-light—light partially obscured by opaque bodies. It could be used as a contrast and by cunning application could be made to enhance the luminosity of full light. Moreover, interior depth and penetration could be obtained with it. Best of all, its uncertainty lent itself to suggestiveness and the mystery of things half seen. Inness was greatly in love with it. Many of his late canvases are called “vague” or sometimes “swampy,” because they are saturated with shadow masses out of which loom or glow mysteriously half-seen forms and colors. Martin made no such use of it as Inness, though many of his foregrounds are in shadow through which one looks to a lightened middle distance or sky. He was very fond of a light broken by being filtered through thin clouds, and he carried this out by employing a diffused thin shadow such as obtains under broken light. It is not often that one meets with dark shadows in his later pictures. He seemed to shy at anything like blackness, and in one of his pictures now in the Metropolitan Museum—the “View on the Seine”—the luminosity is so marked that the picture has the look of a water-color drawing. It was not the black and the “woolly” in Corot that he loved but the luminous and the radiant.
Another omnipresent and universal feature of landscape is color. It is an emanation of light, is, in fact, no more than its dispersed beams. If the light is direct and unclouded, the color will leap to very high pitches, such as we see in the landscapes of Inness or the Algerian scenes of Delacroix or Regnault or Fromentin; if the light comes from below the horizon and is reflected down to earth from the upper sky, the color will be subdued in mellow tones of saffron, rose, and grays such as we see in the dawns of Corot; if the light comes from above the horizon at sunset and is filtered through filmy forms of cumulo-stratus clouds, the color will be delicate broken tones of gold, azure, sad grays such as we see in the “Honfleur Light” or the “Criquebœuf Church” of Martin. He revelled in these subdued tones of broken light. They were not only the eternal coloring of nature but they were the means wherewith he expressed his own sentiment or feeling about nature.