With his early pictures Martin had made considerable success. As far back as 1857 he had exhibited at the National Academy of Design; in 1868 he was elected an associate of the Academy, and in 1874 he was made a full academician. His landscape material at first had been gathered in the Berkshires, then he seems to have tramped and sketched with Edward Gay in the Catskills. In the early sixties he went to the White Mountains, and from 1864 to 1869 he was every summer in the Adirondacks. In 1871 he went to Duluth, Minnesota, at the invitation of Jay Cooke, but the next year found him in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. He was a mountain lover, almost exclusively so, at this time, and apparently not quite happy away from them. Professor Mather, who has closely traced Martin’s career in a notable monograph,[3] says that his sketches in this early period were made with a hard pencil on sheets of gray paper. They were minutely done, drawn in outline, without color, and with no dash or smudge or mere suggestion about them. The pictures painted from them in his studio were perhaps less detailed than the sketches, and as for their color, he no doubt relied upon his visual memory or his instinct for tone and harmony. After 1876 he began to use charcoal in sketching, and later on he took up water-colors and made drawings with them along the Saguenay and elsewhere. Doubtless these later sketch mediums had come to him on his first trip abroad in 1876. [3] _Homer Martin: Poet in Landscape_, by Frank Jewett Mather, New York, 1912. The climax of his early work--that is, before 1876--seems to have been reached in such pictures as the “Lake Sandford.” It was shown at the Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia in 1876, but painted probably as far back as 1870. The scene is in the Adirondacks, and Martin has pictured the lake looking down from a distant height. There is a dark foreground of outcropping rock, then the light-reflecting surface of the long lake, then a ridge of dark mountains, and back of that the light sky--four planes in alternations of dark and light. It is woods, rock, water, and sky--no more. The largeness of Martin’s view, with its grasp of such essential elements as light, air, and space, is quite apparent notwithstanding a handling that seems too small for it. There is no petty puttering over leaves and stones, but the small catches of light-and-dark in the foliage, the tree trunks, the rocks, the sharp, clean-drawn outlines conceal rather than reveal the conception. Moreover, the smooth, enamel-like surface seems to act as a binder and a restraint. An excellent picture, as many another that he painted during this period; but Martin had not yet entirely emerged from his early manner, was not yet expressing himself fully and freely.