THE ART OF CONRAD MARTENS 



Martens never learned to handle oil-colour comfortably ; with 

 one or two exceptions, an even opacity pervades all his work 

 in that medium. As soon as he took up a hog-hair brush 

 he was haunted by his water-colour experience ; and, as he 

 did not possess the secret of keeping his canvas translucent in 

 the shadows and loading his lights, the general result attained 

 is a notable lack of atmosphere. This almost invariably goes with 

 the practice of a hand used to the fluency of water-colour when 

 it essays the heavy medium; and rarely have artists handled both 

 vehicles with equal success. Turner stands unrivalled in water- 

 colour, but his oil paintings have deteriorated through faulty 

 construction. Constable, whose technique in oils was sound 

 enough, handled water-colour so clumsily that his use of it can 

 only be regarded as a time-saving device for the making of colour 

 notes. Martens was no exception to this rule. Though he tried 

 bravely to master the older medium, he drew not by values but 

 by his feeling for form, and was, therefore, confronted from the 

 outset by insuperable obstacles. His work in oils resembles 

 water-colour with a glaze. It lacks both depth and limpidity. 

 His distances do not recede into infinity, but are stayed by dead 

 paint, so that he produces none of the rare characteristics of oil 

 painting fine impasto, variety of tones, charm of gradation and 

 that mystery of shadow, interpenetrated by indefinite shapes which 

 the eye divines but does not seek to determine. We arrive inevit- 

 ably at a surface of paint. Generally, his colour is tame and lacks 

 variety, the trees are heavy and petrified, their edges hard and 

 palpable, artificial; you feel that his spirit has not entered the 

 medium, and that he has been beaten by it. His greatest success 

 in oils is the panel of Sydney Cove, charming in colour and filled 

 with atmosphere. The slightness of scale has helped him here. 

 As the panel is mainly concerned with the middle distance, he 

 has no near difficulties to contend with, and his technical know- 

 ledge suffices for his purpose. Here are no spaces empty of 

 interest ; the small quantity of colour opposed in the pictorial 

 forms embodied is the reason of its success ; expanded to a larger 

 canvas it would have been empty and thin. 



Very different is his accomplishment in water-colour. Here 



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