What part heredity played in his equipment may only be guessed at. His father was a mild-mannered carpenter of New England descent, his mother a strong-willed, quick-witted woman belonging to an old Albany family. It is usually assumed that Martin derived from his mother and got his artistic instincts from her. These latter, it seems, developed early--the mother testifying that before he was two years old she was accustomed to quiet him by giving him pencil and paper. At five he did what has been called a “spirited” drawing of a horse. Doubtless every one can remember something of the same sort told about his own infancy. The drawing habit is common to almost all children and usually means little. But Martin was to demonstrate shortly that he could do nothing else but draw and make pictures. At school in Albany (where he had been born in 1836) he was not a shining success. He said himself that his school-days had been spent in looking through the windows at the Greenbush Hills and longing for the time when he could get over there and draw them. At thirteen his schooling ended, much to his after regret. He then went into his father’s carpenter-shop, but that proved as little attractive as the schoolroom. A clerkship in a store ended disastrously owing to his non-recognition of the amenities of business life. Then he entered an architect’s office and failed there because of defective eyesight. He could not see or draw a vertical line properly. Later on he was eliminated from the Civil War draft because of this same defective vision. His special fitness for the painter’s craft was not very obvious at this time, and yet he was headed strongly that way. It was E. D. Palmer, the sculptor, who persuaded the father to allow Martin to go on with art. Palmer was then the art oracle of Albany, with a little coterie of painters about him consisting of such men as James and William Hart, George H. Boughton, Edward Gay, Launt Thompson. Martin knew them as a boy; and, after sixteen, doing pretty much as he pleased, he frequented their studios, and for two weeks was a pupil of James Hart. That is the only direct instruction he ever received. Before he was twenty he had opened a studio of his own in Albany, was quite well known as a youthful prodigy, and was generally thought to have in him the making of an artist.