physical form. In the few specimens
of Martin to be seen there is, nevertheless, eminent distinction
paramount. He was an artist of "oblique integrity": He saw
unquestionably at an angle, but the angle was a beautiful one, and
while many of his associates were doing American Barbizon, he was
giving forth a shy, yet rare kind of expression, always a little
symbolic in tendency, with the mood far more predominant. In "The sand
dunes of Ontario" there will be found at once a highly individualistic
feeling for the waste places of the world. There is never so much as a
hint of banality in his selection. He never resorts to stock rhetoric.

Martin will be remembered for his singularly personal touch along with
men like Fuller and Ryder. He is not as dramatic as either of these
artists, but he has greater finesse in delicate sensibility. He was, I
think, actually afraid of repetition, a characteristic very much in
vogue in his time, either conscious or unconscious, in artists like
Inness, Wyant, and Blakelock, with their so single note. There is
exceptional mysticity hovering over his hills and stretches of dune
and sky. It is not fog, or rain, or dew enveloping them. It is a
certain veiled presence in nature that he sees and brings forward. His
picture of peaks of the White Mountains, Jefferson and Madison, gives
you no suggestion of the "Hudson River" emptiness. He was searching
for profounder realities. He wanted the personality of his places, and
he was successful, for all of his pictures I have seen display the
magnetic touch. He "touched it off" vividly in all of them. They
reveal their ideas poetically and esthetically and the method is
personal and ample for presentation.

With George Fuller it was vastly different. He seemed always to be
halting in the shadow. You are conscious of a deep and ever so earnest
nature in his pictures. He impressed himself on his canvases in spite
of his so faulty expression. He had an understanding of depth but
surface was strange to him. He garbled his sentences so to speak with
excessive and useless wording. "The Octoroon" shows a fine feeling for
romance as do all of the other pictures of Fuller that have been
publicly visible, but it is romance obsessed with monotone. There is
the evidence of extreme reticence and moodiness in Fuller always. I
know little of him save that I believe he experienced a severity of
domestic problems. Farmer I think he was, and painted at off hours all
h