At this time, no doubt, he had seen in America some works by Corot and the Barbizon men and had been impressed by them, but a new period was to begin for him with his first trip to Europe. This was in 1876. He went to England, where he met and became intimate with Whistler and Albert Moore, then to France, where he visited Barbizon, though Millet and Rousseau were dead. He also went to St. Cloud to see Corot’s sketching-ground, and sketched there a bit himself. He did not do much painting. All of his sojourns abroad were times of study and observation. Mrs. Martin says that his working periods were very irregular, that he absorbed things by a slow means rather than painted by wilful effort; and he himself insisted that he could not paint without the impulse. Of course all this was set down to him as indolence by the hypercritical, but at the present time it is well understood that mental preparedness is necessary for the production of any great work, and that periods of long reflection are not periods of idleness. He returned to New York in December of the same year and took up his painting, but he was now making some decided changes in both his matter and his manner. The generous expanse of the panoramic view was cut down to more modest landscape proportions. No doubt that had come to him from seeing the _paysage intime_ of Corot, Rousseau, and Daubigny. Possibly, too, he had been persuaded by the broad, simple landscapes of Georges Michel, whose pictures were then well known not only in Paris but in New York. At any rate it is quite apparent in Martin’s work after 1876 that he was gradually discarding the “view” for something smaller and more intimate. It was still a mountain landscape known only to God and himself and had no human appeal, but it expressed Martin’s thought and feeling much better than the earlier affair. His brush, too, was broadening. It was beginning to sweep over details, spots, and sparkles, and to emphasize masses of light or dark or color. Exactness of statement, sharpness of line, emphasis of drawing were hindrances rather than helps to expression. Later on, no doubt, he would have agreed _in toto_ with a remark attributed by Charles Ricketts to Puvis de Chavannes: “_La perfection bête qui n’a rien à faire avec le vrai dessin, le dessin expressif!_” It was not until near the end of his career, when his eyesight had nearly gone, that Martin felt himself free from the restraint of method and materials. He then said to his wife in reply to some praise of a picture on the easel: “I have learned to paint at last. If I were quite blind now and knew just where the colors were on my palette I could express my self.”