What a commentary on an age and a people that would appreciate and patronize art! The real jewel lying unnoticed in the dust for years and then a quarrel in court over its paste imitation! Verily the annals of art furnish forth strange reading, and not the least remarkable page is the story of Homer Martin and his pictures. V WINSLOW HOMER I never had more than a nodding acquaintance with Winslow Homer. Several times at opening nights of the National Academy of Design or elsewhere, there was a word of greeting or comment but no more. He sent me, in 1893 or thereabouts, a signed copy of a reproduction of his “Undertow,” and letters were exchanged about it; but nothing noteworthy was in the letters. My impression about him, if I had one, was perhaps not different from that of his contemporaries. He was always thought a diffident, a taciturn, even at times a brusque, person--one who preferred his own silence to any one else’s loquacity. Chase once remarked that he would thank no one for entertainment because he liked his own art better than any one’s society, but that was mere scorn he was just then flinging out at a Philistine millionaire. The remark would fit Homer much better. For Homer lived it and Chase did not. Much of Homer’s brusqueness of manner found its way into his art. There is no grace or charm or polish about it. The manner of it repels rather than wins one. The cunning, the adroit, the insinuating are hardly ever apparent, but in their place we have again and again the direct, the abrupt, the vehement. He states things without prelude or apology in a harsh, almost savage, manner, and the chief reason why we listen to him is that he has something to say. He has seen things in nature at first hand and his statement about them brings home fundamental truths to us with startling force. There is no sentiment or feeling in or about the report. The man never falls into a revery as Martin, or a mood as Wyant, or a passion as Inness. He is merely a reporter and is concerned only with the truth. But it is a very compelling truth that he shows us. He came out of Boston, where in 1836 he was born of New England parents. His father was a hardware merchant and his mother a Maine woman who is said to have had a talent for painting flowers. The inference has been that the son got his first fancy for painting from his mother, though one can hardly imagine anything farther removed from Homer’s liking than the anæmic flower-painting of New England ladies in the 1840’s. On the other hand, his grandfathers had been seafaring men and it is quite possible that he inherited from them that love for the sea that developed in his later life. But then it is difficult to make out that Homer derived anything from any one. He seems to have just grown rather than developed from a stalk or stock.