Essay
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Michael N. Altman Fine Art & Advisory Services, LLC, New York
Martin’s landscapes look as if no one but God and himself had ever seen the places.—John Richard Dennett, journalist, 1904[1]
The corresponding position of transitional painters among the landscapists is held by three men––George Inness, Alexander H. Wyant, and Homer D. Martin. It was they who showed American painters and people the larger view of nature and of art which they had themselves in part discovered.—George Breed Zug, art critic, 1908[2]
Cherished All Too Late Homer Dodge Martin received little critical acclaim during his lifetime. Unlike his colleagues in the Hudson River school, Martin sold few paintings,[3] which led T. Worthington Whittredge to comment that Martin had “died before anybody discovered that he was a painter.”[4] After Martin’s death, however, his rightful position as a seminal figure in American landscape painting was quickly realized. The Cleveland Museum of Art asserted that his landscapes were “full of the peculiar poetry which is always the mark of a man.” Royal Cortissoz declared that no museum of American art would be complete without a Martin painting.[5] And even contemporary art historians count him as “a key transitional figure in American art.”[6]
SJS
Martin’s paintings are featured in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Portland Art Museum, and Smithsonian American Art Museum.
[1] John Richard Dennett, quoted in Elizabeth Gilbert Martin, Homer Martin: A Reminiscence (New York: W. Macbeth, 1904), p. ix.
[2] George Breed Zug, “The Story of American Painting, IX. Contemporary Landscape Painting,” The Chauntauquan: A Weekly News Magazine 50, no. 3 (May 1908): 369.
[3] Patricia C. F. Mandel, “The Stories behind Three Important Late Homer D. Martin Paintings,” Archives ofAmerican Art Journal 13, no. 3 (1973): 2.
[4] John Driscoll, All that Is Glorious Around Us: Paintings from the Hudson River School (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 106.
