Elizabeth Gilbert Martin

“ He came, nevertheless, a number of times, paying his last visit on the Saturday evening before Homer died. And then, before leaving, he said to me: “There is not the ghost of a hope that your husband will do just exactly what you wish him to do. And, for my part, I am content to leave him in the hands of God just as he is. He is absolutely honest. If he could take another step forward, he would do it.” And, on his part, Homer said to me, “Father Shields has the clearest mind of any man I ever met. ”

“ To Homer also Villerville was as delightful as any place could be while lacking [36] 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. ”

“ We were fairly prosperous in those early years, or might have been if we had been constituted differently. “There is much [16] 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. ”

“ I have never met anything like it elsewhere save in the parish of the Paulist Fathers in New York. I speak from what may be called exhaustive knowledge, since there was a period, before we left the former place, when we were out of money for so long that when at last we were able to settle Madame Cornu’s bill it amounted to the considerable sum of two thousand francs. I had asked her some time previously if she were not in need of it, but only to receive the smiling answer: “When Madame pleases. We are neither of us robbers.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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?
ON THE HUDSON
Reproduced from the original painting through the courtesy of John M. Robertson, Esq.
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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Reproduced from the original painting in the Metropolitan Museum, New York
He used to carry about with him in those days a pocket sketch-book in which he noted his impressions in water-color. Mr. Brownell must remember it, and so, I think, must Mr. Russell Sturgis, for, being at our rooms during my husband’s last sojourn on the other side of the Atlantic, when he was known to be afflicted with an incurable malady, he said to me that if Homer’s things were ever put up for sale, he would like to [41] become the purchaser of this book. ”

“ 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. [22] 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 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. ”

“ She explained that she was the wife of a major in the English army, and had but just returned with him from India; also, that while there she had read such a glowing description of the beauties of Villerville in a copy of “The Queen,” that she had determined to examine them for herself. I did what I could for her in the way of finding a furnished apartment, and before they had removed to it, went one morning to return her call at one of the hotels. I found her and the major at a late breakfast, with the English newspapers lying about. ”

“ A Unitarian clergyman in the neighborhood began calling on him in the early winter and contributed much to his entertainment in some of my unavoidable absences. But, as Christmas was approaching, my husband asked me to request the Reverend Doctor Shields, now Professor of Psychology in [57] the Catholic University at Washington, D. C., to pay him a visit. Said he: “L⸺ is a good fellow; he thinks just as I do about the tariff and the civil service, and he likes good books. ”

“ The second one I completed after our return to New York, and it was published under the title of “John Van Alstyne’s Factory,” in the “Catholic World.”
To Homer our life in France was chiefly seed-time. There germinated his “Low Tide at Villerville,” the “Honfleur Lights,” the “Criquebœuf Church,” the “Normandy Trees,” the “Normandy Farm,” the “Sun Worshipers,” and the landscape known in the Metropolitan Gallery of New York, where it now hangs, as a “View on the Seine,”—which, in strictness, it is not,—but for which his own [40] title was “The Harp of the Winds.” ”

“ 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, [37] 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. ”

“ It was full of [45] light and color. The land on the left sloped gradually down nearly to the middle of the foreground, and the wonderful sheet of water behind and beyond it that fairly rippled out of the frame, was dazzling. What he called it I do not know. To each other we never gave his landscapes any name, nor did he to any one else unless a purchaser required a title, or there was question of a catalogue. I think, however, that this canvas may be one which was completed in January, 1889, while I was in Toledo, and which was bought almost as soon as finished by Mr. ”