THE ART OF CONRAD MARTENS 



speak the language of Harding, master of plumbago these, and all 

 the well-used subjects which the practitioners of the day found 

 acceptable to the genius ot water-colour, have demanded and 

 received their measure of commentary from his brush. There is 

 no sense of originality yet ; but before he leaves England he has 

 learnt to play freely with his pencil, and some drawings in the 

 Dixson collection show that he has a more than casual knowledge 

 of perspective and architectural form. 



His South American work had little artistic result beyond 

 his drawings for the engravers, inadequately handled by Landseer, 

 who upset their unity of tone ; and his Tahiti drawings, developed 

 long after his stay on the island, have not that convincing air that 

 invariably goes with work the subject matter of which has been 

 thoroughly digested. Not until he has made Sydney his own 

 does his personality stand revealed. For though he landed here 

 well enough equipped, a proficient sketcher, and a keen observer, 

 yet upon his work no seal of originality had been set. That 

 originality Sydney and her harbour were to discover, for in his 

 revelation of their beauty Martens was to find both himself and 

 his art. 



In painting the harbour, Martens had an advantage lost to us 

 by the development of the suburban system : there were no 

 mathematical lines of red roof to disturb the harmony of his skies. 

 The city itself, always beautiful from a distance in its changing 

 greys upon the sky-line, has added only to its mass the loud 

 garishness of advertisement crude witness to our provincialism 

 and apathy ! The quiet seclusion of the foreshores, charming 

 bays and happy beaches, with an occasional well-placed villa for 

 sign of man's presence, have since passed into the clutch of 

 Progress that arrant alderman and parvenu. For the purpose 

 of a painter, nothing could have been better than this gracious 

 landscape of sky and water and undulating hills, with its distant 

 town and clear horizon, that knew not yet the smoke of factories. 

 He could consider a unity of mass unbroken by petty details ; and 

 the essential nobility of some of Martens' compositions, granted 

 that its first cause lay in the artist's mind, must admit, as con- 

 tributory factor, the almost unsullied beauty of the foreshores. It 



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