Excerpt from Landscape and Figure, Painters of America

HE work of no American painter of landscape more certainly requires an intimate acquaint ance for its full enjoyment or more fully repays one for a painstaking study of its various manifestations than that of Homer Dodge Martin. Inness, who was unquestionably a greater master, in all the wide range of his product never but once or twice touches one so nearly. Wyant, who was more closely akin temperamentally, touches one oftener though never so nearly nor so deeply. His was also a poetic in terpretation of nature notable for its refinement in the same sense as Martin's; his vision, however, was much more limited than either Martin's or Inness's and he was obviously incapable of developing the larger aspects of a theme as they did. Wyant and Martin were both poets in landscape; Wyant is lyrical, Martin epic in his product. One may prefer the one or the other, but of relative valueof the Work of the two there can be no reasonable difference of opinion. Inness and Wyant, the former in a large and the latter in a smaller way, are both emotional painters. Martin is consciously intellectual. He selected his subjects with so com prehensive a knowledge of their adaptability to his needs and with so delicate an appreciation of their possibilities for the expression of his moods that one of his closest friends once said that his finest canvases looked as if no one but God and he had ever seen the places pictured. Wyant and Inness painted more nearly whatever happened to excite their emotion. That the emotions of the latter were of many kinds and those of the former of but few explains the variety in the product of the one that is lacking in that of the other. Wyant's paint ings are full of sentiment of a very exquisite sort, tender but too serious ever to even approach sen timentality. Inness's are charged with much stronger feeling but seldom so finely felt if invaria bly more ably expressed. Indeed, both Wyant and Martin express more successfully the rarer as peets of nature and Inness's pre-eminence rests upon the variety of his achievement and the high average of its excellence rather than upon any superior ability in the matter of expression. Inness is too fully engrossed in the reproduction of the actual appearances of things to bother with their spiritual.

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