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.