Back once more in New York, Martin took a studio in Fifty-fifth Street, where he completed many of his Normandy canvases. After 1890 he had a painting-room in Fifty-ninth Street, where he did the “Haunted House” and the “Normandy Trees.” In 1892 he made a last trip to England, and spent some time at Bournemouth with George Chalmers. Returned again to America, he went to St. Paul to join Mrs. Martin, stopping on the way at the Chicago Fair, where a number of his pictures were shown. At St. Paul his eyesight began failing to an alarming degree. A famous oculist declared the optic nerve of one eye dead and the other eye clouded with cataract. But Martin now painted on with redoubled energy, as though conscious that his time was short. He finished a number of pictures and sent them on to New York, where he had a selling arrangement with a dealer. But alas! the pictures did not sell, and shortly afterward the painter laid aside his brushes. He was fatally ill with a malignant growth in the throat, and death came to him as something of a relief in 1897. [Illustration: “View on the Seine,” by Homer D. Martin. In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.] It was in these latter years only that Martin said that at last he had learned how to paint. Mrs. Martin had been lauding a picture called “The Adirondacks,” saying that if he never did another stroke he would go out in a blaze of glory, and it was his answer to her. He probably meant by the remark that he had arrived at a method of handling that fully expressed his thought. In reality it was the same old method, only it had been broadened and simplified. Except in his very early works, Martin had never been given to excessive surface detail. He painted with a comparatively broad brush almost from the start--painted with a flat stroke rather than with a stippling point. The “White Mountain” picture in the Metropolitan Museum, painted in 1868, shows substantially the same brush-work as the “Lake Ontario Sand Dunes” of nearly twenty years later. The sand-dunes picture seems to have been done largely with a palette-knife. Apparently it is trowelled across the canvas, with one tone or color laid over another, flattened down, compressed, blended. This applies especially to the sky; only the dead trees in the foreground are painted with a brush. In the “View on the Seine,” also in the Metropolitan Museum, the foliage and rocks are painted with the brush, but, again, the sky and water seem laid down in layers of paint, put on in long bands, and flattened to a lacquered surface. These bands of color in the sky, superimposed one upon another like platings of glass in a La Farge window, appear again in the “Honfleur Light.” All the hues seem blended by superimposition to produce a golden opalescent glow in the sky. Mrs. Martin said he used colors as a poet does words, and here, no doubt, he was getting orchestration in his sky by fusing many colors together.