Homer Martin, a Reminiscence, October 28, 1836-February 12, 1897

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.

Reproduced from the original painting in the Wilstach Collection, Philadelphia]

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-wingèd 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.