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HOMER MARTIN

A REMINISCENCE

HOMER MARTIN

A REMINISCENCE

OCTOBER 28, 1836--FEBRUARY 12, 1897

NEW YORK WILLIAM MACBETH 1904

FACING PAGE

NORMANDY TREES 6

THE DUNES 12

ON THE HUDSON 18

BLOSSOMING TREES 24

THE HAUNTED HOUSE 28

THE CRIQUEBOEUF CHURCH 32

GOLDEN SANDS 36

ON THE SEINE 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 pre?minently 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

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 acquainted. But for the anti-slavery movement which split the Methodist body first into two great sections and then into minor subdivisions, we might have met much earlier, for, in our childhood, our parents had attended the same place of worship.

What I know, therefore, about his early years I learned chiefly from his mother. He was not of a reminiscent habit as a rule, and his recollections of childhood were not always pleasant. His father was one of the most upright and altogether the mildest-tempered of all the men that I have met. His mother was a woman of strong but uncultivated mind, keen wit, incisive speech and arbitrary will, from whom her son derived many of his own characteristics, including his innate bent toward pictorial expression. In her that inclination never took any but the crudest shape, but she had beyond all peradventure the instinct which under more propitious circumstances would have displayed itself more convincingly. Perhaps the very cramping of it in her was the cause of its appearance at so preternaturally early an age in him. She more than once told me that he began to draw as soon as he could hold a pencil, and that from his twentieth month to provide him with one and a piece of blank paper was the surest means of quieting his most turbulent outbreaks. Years afterward, not long before our marriage, his first schoolmistress sent me a spirited drawing of a horse which she said he had made for her when not more than five years old.

This drawing was produced in one of the Albany ward schools, and it pretty accurately foreshadowed all that he was to accomplish in them thereafter. I doubt if he ever took kindly to lessons obviously given. Even in painting, his sole direct tuition was imparted by James Hart and extended over two weeks only. What he needed, what suited him, he then and always took in, so to say, through his pores, absorbing what he required, leaving other things untouched, and wrestling unaided with his personal problems. Greatly to his own after regret, his ordinary schooling ended when he was thirteen. But at the time his aversion to school-books and school routine dovetailed to a marvel with the persuasion of his relatives that it was time for him to begin earning his own livelihood. He once told me that his school-hours had been largely spent in looking through the windows at the Greenbush hills on the other side of the Hudson, and in longing for the time to come when he could go over there in the horse-boat with paper and pencil to record a nearer view.

Nevertheless, it was only for school-books as such that he had an intimate aversion. In other lines all was fish that came to his net. How he obtained it I do not know, but a copy of Volney's "Ruins" which he read at this period colored his opinions in a way that he afterward found reason to regret. But at the time it made him an irreverent, amused, and precocious critic of the talk he heard at Conference-time, when itinerant ministers thronged the family board.

Poetry of certain kinds attracted him throughout his life, and verse that greatly pleased him would stamp itself indelibly on his memory. Once in a great while, almost to the last, I could persuade him to repeat to me Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," with a lingering enunciation and a melancholy charm of accent which a few of his most intimate friends may likewise recall. I especially remember one night in Villerville, when we were alone out-of-doors in the late moonlight, awaiting in vain the advent of a nightingale said to have been heard in the neighborhood, that he more than compensated me for its absence by reciting the whole of the same poet's lines to that "light-wing?d Dryad of the trees." Reciting, I say, but the word is ill chosen. It was rather a barely audible yet perfectly distinct breathing out of the ineffable melancholy and remoteness of those perfect lines.

Homer was transferred to his father's carpenter shop on leaving school; but even that most patient of men came at last to the reluctant conclusion that the long, slender fingers which could not refrain from ornamenting smoothly planed boards with irrelevant trees and mountains were of no use at all in handling saws and chisels. A shopkeeper with whom he was next placed as clerk, much against the boy's own will, soon discharged him for incorrigible--perhaps premeditated--rudeness to customers. One of these, who was a young cleric in the Episcopalian Seminary in Ninth Avenue, New York City, when he told me the story, described in words too graphic to quote, the manner in which, as a child, he had once been driven out of the shop and all memory of what he was sent for out of his mind, by the thunderous scowl and wrath-freighted tone and terms in which Homer inquired what he wanted.

He was next introduced into the architect's office of a relative, whence he was eliminated, partly because his cousin thought the inevitable landscapes that decorated his plans totally superfluous, but also on account of Homer's congenital inability to see perpendicular lines distinctly. I think I never saw him draw an upright of any sort without first laying his paper or canvas on its side. When the Civil War broke out, shortly before our marriage, and he presented himself for the draft, it was this defect of vision which caused the examiners to reject him.

Every attempt at harnessing him to a beaten track of obvious utility and present productiveness having terminated disastrously, from the paternal point of view, E. D. Palmer, the Albany sculptor, finally succeeded in persuading the elder Homer Martin that his son's talent and inclination for art were too marked and exclusive to permit of his success in any other pursuit. Thenceforward--he was perhaps sixteen--he was left free to follow the bent of his genius. I do not know where he painted at first; perhaps at home. Later on, he had a studio in the old Museum Building, at the junction of State Street and Broadway. James Hart had previously occupied it, and it was probably there that for a fortnight he acted as Homer's instructor.

There were other painters in Albany at the time: William Hart, George Boughton, Edward Gay, perhaps one or two others, with all of whom he was intimate and whose studios he frequented. Boughton went abroad not long after, and, when he was in France, once wrote to Launt Thompson in most enthusiastic terms concerning the landscapes of Corot, whose great vogue had hardly yet begun, but with whose work Boughton was at once enchanted. And, in describing it, he remarked that "if Homer Martin had been his pupil he could hardly paint more like him." It was not until long years after that Thompson had the grace to repeat the observation to Homer, and when at last he did so, the only reply he got was: "Why did you not tell me that years ago, when it would have been of some service to me?" For Homer, too, was one of the Corot worshipers from the first.

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.

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.

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?

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.

He sailed for England the second time in October, 1881, and I joined him in London early in the next July. On the "glorious Fourth" we visited Mr. Whistler's studio, where Homer had occasionally painted. I think it must have been there that he painted, late in the previous autumn, a delightful Newport landscape which was bought at the Artist Fund sale of that season by Mr. Lanthier for Mr. Charles de Kay. Whistler's beautiful portrait of his mother--which I afterward saw in Paris at the Salon--was on the easel, and it is the only one of his pictures which I distinctly recollect. There were some "nocturnes" on the walls, and they were doubtless worth remembering. But I never went there again, and on this occasion my attention was riveted by the artist and his surroundings, alike spectacular and bizarre, the man grotesque as a caricature in attitude and aspect, the rooms all pale blue and lemon-yellow, even to the many vases and the flowers therein contained. He said a good many things, not one of which was I able to recall, so lost was I in contemplation of the general oddity of him and his chosen environment. "What did you think of him?" asked Homer after we came away. "Why didn't you talk? You never said a thing." "I was afraid to open my lips," said I, "lest I should involuntarily tell him to shake that feather out of his hair. He must have had his head buried in a pillow before we went in." "I wish you had!" said he with a laugh. "That is Jimmy's feather. He delights in having it noticed." I had observed that he bowed profoundly on our introduction and so brought it into staring evidence; but I could scarcely believe, even on testimony, that the premeditated effect was produced by a quite unpremeditated lock of gray hair.

In October of that year, the completion of the last drawing coincided with the arrival in London of an old New York friend, the late Mr. Bryant Godwin, and an invitation to spend some weeks in Normandy with the family of another, W. J. Hennessy, the well-known artist and illustrator. There was no further reason for delay in England, and the three of us crossed the Channel one night by the Southampton boat. I have never forgotten my first sight of the French shore next morning. "I don't wonder now at Rousseau's color," I said to Homer; "how could he help it?"

It had been our intention to return to New York after a brief visit with the Hennessys, who had been living for years in a picturesque and pleasant way at Pennedepie, an agricultural hamlet on the road between Honfleur and Trouville, where they occupied a roomy and quaintly furnished old manor just opposite the village church. But we found the place, the people, and the neighboring views alike delightful, and when news arrived, early in our stay, of a considerable sum to his credit which had been lying for some months uncalled for at the American Exchange, London, where it had been sent to his first address by Mr. James Stillman, Homer decided on remaining in Normandy. To have returned to New York just then would have been a distinct loss to both of us in many ways. I look back on the time we spent in Villerville as the most tranquil and satisfactory period of our life together.

That little fishing village, dominated by the tower of a church erected when the eleventh century was young, in thanksgiving because the foreboded end of the world had not come in the year 1000, lies about midway between Honfleur and Trouville, at an easy walk from Pennedepie. Equidistant from either place stands the ivy-grown church of Criqueboeuf, beloved of artists, and made by Homer the theme of one of his best pictures. In the same grassy enclosure on the right of the pond into which this old church dips its foot, he found two more delightful subjects. One of them is embodied on one of his last canvases, the "Normandy Farm," now owned, I believe, by Mr. Bloomingdale of New York. It was bought in the first place by Mr. W. T. Evans, a week or so before my husband's death. The other, a view of a deserted manor, showing dimly through a veil of ghostly trees, which Mrs. Hennessy declared ought to be called "The Haunted House," was finished in New York after his return for an early friend, Dr. D. M. Stimson, to whom for many years he had been greatly attached. I think it was exhibited at the Chicago World's Fair.

To Homer also Villerville was as delightful as any place could be while lacking that social intercourse with men of brains and cultivation which was always his chief pleasure and relaxation. Years afterward, Mr. Brownell said one evening when we were all dining together in those pleasant apartments of theirs on Fifty-sixth Street, that the three weeks which he and his wife had spent there with us seemed to him more like his idea of heaven than anything he remembered. And he asked me whether I would not like to live it all over again. In retrospect, yes; as I have just been proving. But, were it possible in reality? O no! Never have I seen a day that has tempted me to say to it: "Stay, thou art fair!"

Our sojourn in Villerville was a particularly important one for both of us, but in different ways. For him it was a period of absorption rather than of production, while, on that very account, exactly the reverse process went on in me. I have already said it was at his suggestion that I accompanied his Villerville drawings with an article which, Mr. Brownell afterward wrote me, was like "a Martin landscape put into words." Homer perhaps thought so himself, for he had already said: "I see that you can paint with words. I wonder if you can set people in action. Why not try?" Whereupon I made a character sketch which Mr. Alden, of "Harper's Magazine," declined because "it was too painful," but which the then editor of "Lippincott's"--I think his name was Kirk--found too short, and wrote me that if I would lengthen it out so that it should bear less resemblance to a truncated cone, he would be glad to avail himself of it. Whereupon I recalled it, fished up my heroine out of an earthquake on the island of Capri which I had allowed to swallow her, but whom I now unearthed, none the worse except in the matter of a broken wrist,--I think it was a wrist,--and in a month or so received a very fair-sized check for the tale of her experiences.

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