THE ART OF CONRAD MARTENS 



reared by the genius of one man to-day the ignorant scorn of 

 both public and artist besotted with photographic reproduction 

 is dead and almost forgotten ; but it confirmed that love of 

 landscape which is a peculiar appanage of the English race. 



The typical picture engendered by topographical necessity was 

 that panorama of nature known as the View, and the idea of its 

 value persists, though not in the mind of the artist. Choosing his 

 height upon the hill, the painter commanded an outlook over an 

 unbroken lie of country. The windings of the river, or the broad 

 waters of lake or haven, were ever-welcome breaks in the 

 uniformity of the land ; valleys and hills, intervening, materially 

 aided the perspective of the scene, and a distant chain of 

 mountains upon the sky-line was never found amiss. A rocky 

 foreground with trees to left and right helped to force the distance 

 into the inane of the sky, with a near figure or two, or cattle, or 

 some evidence of man's presence. Tourist Bureaux, and the 

 photographer, have long usurped the place and use of the old 

 topographer ; yet, strangely enough, owing to the inability of the 

 lens to render the perspective of distances, the camera often fails 

 where the good draughtsman succeeds. 



Much of Martens' work must be classed as topography, and the 

 bulk of his commissioned work was views either of or from the 

 patron's residence. Sometimes for they had good eyes for a 

 site, those grandfathers of ours Martens had no trouble with the 

 subject ; but more often he had to be content with making the best 

 use possible of his material, to the fettering of his imagination. 

 To do justice to the artist, we must be prepared to disassociate 

 such bread-and-butter stuff from the work of his choice, and 

 regret that the necessity, which kept him working in the " gentle- 

 manly interest," did not more often leave him free to follow Ariel 

 into the region of pure beauty. Yet for the necessity that called 

 him to topography we have reason to be grateful. His indefatig- 

 able pencil has left such a treasury of drawings that no history of 

 our first century in New South Wales and Queensland would 

 be complete without them. His sketch-book could never have 

 been far from his hand, and the flying pencil that ministered to 

 the calm eye left little to record once it had harvested its view. 



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