The little aloofness of manner that prevented Wyant from being a pronounced social light was not a characteristic of Homer Martin. From his youth upward Martin was companionable, had in fact something of a genius for making friends. All through his life he maintained social relations with the wise and the witty of his time, moved in intellectual club circles, and both at home and abroad was accounted a man of mind, a rare _raconteur_ and conversationalist, a most attractive personality. His droll comments and quick retorts are still told at his club, and form perhaps something of a contrast to his pictures hanging upon the walls near by. For there was never anything amusing about Martin’s art. He indulged in no drollery of the brush, and no intelligent person ever got a smile out of his canvases. They are serious, almost solemn, affairs. Mrs. Martin, in her delightful reminiscences of her husband, quotes John R. Dennett as saying that “Martin’s landscapes look as if no one but God and himself had ever seen the places.” There is, indeed, nothing of human interest about them. A distant figure or a house is occasionally introduced as a light spot in a dark plane, or otherwise to help out the composition; but the figure always suggests a wraith or a spook, and the house is deserted or haunted. Says Mrs. Martin: “There is an austerity, a remoteness, a certain savagery in even the sunniest and most peaceful of his landscapes, which were also in him, and an instinctive perception of which had made me say to him in the very earliest days of our acquaintance that he reminded me of Ishmael.” There is no contradiction of character in these two phases of Martin’s mentality. They argue merely versatility. He was exceedingly fond of the silent, even melancholy, beauty of nature, as he was of the solemn seriousness of fine poetry; but these were not themes for talk at the club. Mrs. Martin says she never heard him “talk shop” and that, with several notable exceptions such as La Farge and Winslow Homer, most of his close friends were people in other professions than painting. He never tabooed art as a topic of conversation, but he could talk on other themes quite as well. The mental facet that reflected him as a man of the world gave out a different light from that which proclaimed him a poet in landscape. His was not a one-facet mind.