A very characteristic example is the “Westchester Hills,” because it is at once so powerful and so free from any of the small and perfectly legitimate devices to attract attention; a picture that in its sobriety of mellow browns and whites (for such, very broadly speaking, is its colour scheme) makes no bid for popularity; in a gallery might escape the notice of a careless visitor, and grows upon one’s comprehension only gradually. In the gathering gloom of twilight we are confronted with a country road crossed by a thread of water and bounded on the right by a rough stone wall. The road winds away from us, skirting the ridge of hill, which slumbers like some vast recumbent beast against the expanse of fading sky. The dim foreground and shadowed mass
From the collection of Daniel Guggenheim, Esq.
From the collection of Louis Marshall, Esq.
are grandly modelled; strength, solidity, and bulk, contrasted with the tremulous throbbing of the light. This contrast of rude, tawny ground with the vibration of a white sky recalls a favourite theme of the French painter Pointelin; but one feels that a comparison of his pictures with the “Westchester Hills” is all in favour of the latter. Both painters have felt the solemn loneliness of nature folding her strength in sleep, the mystery of darkening and of the lingering spirituality above; but Martin is the grander draughtsman of the two, suggesting with far more convincingness the solid structure of the earth. So we are made to realize that the phenomenon is not merely one that he has noted or that we might note, but one that through countless ages has manifested itself as part of the order of the universe.
Its significance is elemental. We may attribute this to the better drawing, or, with far more justice, to the superiority of intellect, that could embrace this larger conception and find the means to express it. And in studying the means let us not overlook the essential grandeur of the colour; not of the brave or passionate kind, but sober with a concentration of subtle meaning, that discovers infinite expression in the minutest variations of the homely browns and yellows, which in the shadow yield nothing but their strength and quietude. And, then, what a wonder of suggestion in the sky! It is not only lighted, but quivering with light; an elastic fluid that extends as far as one’s imagination can travel, in height, and breadth, and depth. These limitless skies are a characteristic of Martin’s pictures. He does not seem to have been attracted so much by cloud forms or to have been given, as it were, to building castles in the air; but his imagination loves to free itself in the far stretches of ether, the circumambient medium through which the waves of light travel. His skies are brushed in with firm assurance; it is a pleasure to peer into the canvas and study the sweep and exultation of the strokes, and then to step back until distance blends them into a unity of ranging grandeur. And just as Corot said of himself, that he was “like a lark pulsing forth its songs amid the gray clouds,” and his skies have the vibrative quality of violin music, so there is music in these skies of Martin’s, only it is that of the organ and the diapason stop. True, the note is not always so full and sonorous; as, for example, in the “View on the Seine” in the Metropolitan Museum, where the splendid blue and white have a more silvery resonance, which, however, is less suggestive of songfulness than of the sweep of music travelling on and on. Indeed, in all his skies, there is less of local significance than of the suggestion that the ether is a tidal ocean connecting the fragment of circumstance with infinity.