



Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
generously made available by The Internet Archive)










HOMER MARTIN

A REMINISCENCE

[Illustration: HOMER MARTIN

From a photograph taken in England in 1892]




    HOMER MARTIN

    A REMINISCENCE

    [Illustration]

    OCTOBER 28, 1836—FEBRUARY 12, 1897

    NEW YORK
    WILLIAM MACBETH
    1904

    Copyright, 1904, by WILLIAM MACBETH

    [Illustration]




ILLUSTRATIONS


    PORTRAIT OF HOMER MARTIN         _Frontispiece_

                                       FACING PAGE

    NORMANDY TREES                               6

    THE DUNES                                   12

    ON THE HUDSON                               18

    BLOSSOMING TREES                            24

    THE HAUNTED HOUSE                           28

    THE CRIQUEBŒUF CHURCH                       32

    GOLDEN SANDS                                36

    ON THE SEINE (“HARP OF THE WINDS”)          40

    TREES NEAR VILLERVILLE                      46

    CAPE TRINITY                                52

    A NEWPORT LANDSCAPE                         56

The publisher cordially thanks the friends who kindly lent the pictures
which have been reproduced to illustrate these pages.




INTRODUCTION


During the last year I have more than once been told that an
authoritative biographical sketch of my husband ought to be written
and I have never felt inclined to dispute the statement as an abstract
proposition. But when it is followed by the direct question: “Who so
capable of writing it as you?” the names of one or two of his personal
friends inevitably present themselves as belonging to practised writers
and connoisseurs of art, who might, perhaps, need the aid of dates or
facts I could supply, but who, in more essential respects, would be
altogether better equipped for the task. Homer Martin was so intensely
masculine, so preëminently a man’s man, that he must necessarily have
escaped thorough comprehension by any woman. And this, I think, is the
chief reason why I have so long delayed, why I am even now inclined to
shirk altogether, the fulfilment of my reluctant promise to put on paper
some of my memories of the years we spent together.

The question made me smile when it was propounded more than a year ago,
but since then it has often made me ponder. Doubtless no one else has had
so long and intimate an acquaintance with various phases of his character
and circumstances; doubtless, too, it was not merely as an artist that
he commanded attention and attracted life-long friends. Yet I suppose
it must be solely in this character that he appeals to the majority of
those who are now attaining to a tardy appreciation of his achievement
as a whole. It is not in my power to hasten that. When I first met him
my ignorance of art—at any rate on its pictorial side—was dense; and
if it has been somewhat mitigated since, that result is due solely to
him and largely to his own works. Is not this tantamount to expressing
my conviction that those who wish to increase their knowledge of Homer
Martin as an artist can do so much more satisfactorily by studying the
landscapes into which he has put as much of his best self as any man
could part with and live, than by reading anything I find it possible to
say about him? Aspects of external nature are inextricably blended in
these with the mind, moods, and personality of the painter. Years before
he had quite succeeded in mastering his material, I remember the late
John Richard Dennett saying of them: “Martin’s landscapes look as if no
one but God and himself had ever seen the places.” There is an austerity,
a remoteness, a certain savagery in even the sunniest and most peaceful
of them, 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. They formed, I think, the substratum of his
personality. Needless to add, for those who knew him even slightly, that
he had other phases. Though the human verb in him was one and singular,
its moods were many.

                                                ELIZABETH GILBERT MARTIN.




A REMINISCENCE




[Illustration]




A REMINISCENCE


Homer Dodge Martin, fourth child and youngest son of Homer Martin and
Sarah Dodge, was born in Albany, N. Y., in a house on Park Street,
October 28, 1836. That was my own native city, but although we must
have lived for years in the same neighborhood, he was past twenty-two
and I in my twenty-first year when we first became