THE LIFE OF CONRAD MARTENS 



other respects they performed all the functions of labour usually 

 discharged by beasts of burden at home." 



Martens has left us no reminiscences of Colonial life under the 

 old regime. His bent was topography and landscape, and his 

 figures, though they take their place as landscape accessories, are 

 of the family of Claude, who used to say that he included them 

 with the price of the picture and made no charge for them. It 

 would have needed a Hogarth, caustic and bitterly observant, to 

 portray that heterogeneous society ; the self-sufficient officialdom, 

 the prosperous parvenu emancipists, the Brahmin Pure Merinos, 

 the Rowlandson doxies and all that dramatic underworld fated to 

 escape the " Tree of the Triple Crook " in the old land only, perhaps, 

 to find the " Rope of the Black Election " in the new. 



The landscape painter, " cloud merchant " like the poet, is 

 generally indifferent to the play of human life. For him the 

 study of nature is all-sufficing, and when he has captured a new 

 phrase from her illimitable dictionary to add to his art, " all's well 

 with the world." We can be sure that our gentle-minded painter 

 was interested in at least two sections of this society the Pure 

 Merinos and the official classes, from whom alone he could expect 

 patronage and pupils. He took lodgings in Cumberland Street, 

 near the Fort, in the " Rocks " area, which was still a fashionable 

 quarter, and not yet outrivalled by Hyde Park. He probably 

 pitched upon Cumberland Street as a likely lay for pupils ; 

 suburban quiet, too, reigned there. It was out of the way of 

 traffic, and, to Sydney folk of that date, residence in the Rocks 

 presented some of the advantages of the North Shore of to-day. 



Martens made numerous sketches from his heights above the 

 Cove, and was never tired of drawing, with something of a thought 

 of England in the resemblance, that graceful manor-house which 

 is Government House. Ships, those " beautiful and bold adven- 

 turers," came in from sea, freighted with crime and merchandise 

 and brave emigrants, and were moored not far beneath him. He 

 could see the sails of the windmills turning on the sky-line of the 

 Domain, and to the right the long barrack of the Rum Hospital, 

 and the delicate spire of St. James's, Sydney's landmark from 

 every point of the compass. 



