This landscape also shows that his imagination was not wedded to the solemn. It is brisk with the _joie de vivre_, and yet not in a merely sprightly way. In the line of poplars on the right of the picture, each spiring up into the sky, there is the sense of springing aspiration. Again, in that beautiful “Adirondack Scenery,” with its waves of brilliant foliage rolling between the brow, on which we feel ourselves standing, and the distant cliffs of mountains, what exuberance of spiritual joy! Spiritual, indeed, for the picture was painted far away in the West, indoors, and under the affliction of failing health. But who would guess it from the picture? Martin had so possessed himself of the sweetness and majesty of the Adirondacks, that he could give out from himself, drawing upon the treasures of his memory. It was his swan song, and how characteristic of the essential nobility of the man, that it breathes such ample serenity, such a boundless sense of beauty, pure, spacious, and enduring! He never dwelt upon his troubles, as smaller men do; and this last picture is a grand assertion of the supremacy of mind over matter,--a poet’s triumphant proof that his dream of beauty was strong within him to the last.
Martin’s work, like that of other great men, was uneven in quality. But if it lacks at times perfect intelligibility of construction or of form, it was not from want of knowledge or ability to draw, as is abundantly proved by the superlative excellence of these very qualities in his finest pictures. He had made countless studies, drawn with the greatest care, revealing a thorough feeling for and comprehension of form. At times, he may have found a difficulty in translating his knowledge into paint. His use of the brush, used as he needed to use it to express what he had in mind, had been necessarily self-acquired, and often it was rather the subtlety of the effect he desired to express than any fractiousness of the brush, which caused him to fumble, though, in the majority of his work, never sufficiently to distress us or to divert attention from the message that his picture conveys. For always, in his best pictures, there is this distinction of a message; not a mere friendly interchange of views between the painter and his friend, or simple, easy platitude regarding nature’s beauty, but a deep, strong, personal assertion of some specific truth of beauty, fundamentally and enduringly true. It is the sort of message that appeals to the depth and