Full text of "Conrad Martens : the man and his art"

See other formats

CONRAD MATCI

THE MAN AND HIS ART

By LIONEL LINDSAY

\*r

[••'

ANGUS & ROBERTSON

CONRAD MARTENS AND HIS ART

Printed by
W. C. Penfold «t Co. Ltd., 88 Pitt Street, Sydney, Australia

Obtainable in Great Britain from The British Australasian

Book-store, 51 High Holborn, London, W.C. 1., and all other

Booksellers ; and (wholesale only) from The Australian Book

Company, 16 Farringdon Avenue, London, E.G. 4.

29 x 24 in.

Conrad Martens
From a portrait in oils
painted by himself

In the possession of
Miss Combes of Fonthil!

CONRAD MARTENS

THE MAN AND HIS ART

BY
fcj&»*

*- LIONEL LINDSAY

AUTHOR OF "THE AUSTRALIAN WORK
OF ARTHUR STREETON"

AUSTRALIA :

ANGUS & ROBERTSON LTD.

89 CASTLEREAGH STREET, SYDNEY

1920

£22893
9.H-5&

To WILLIAM DIXSON, ESQ.

WHOSE COLLECTION OF MARTENS' LETTERS AND
NOTE-BOOKS HAS MADE THIS BOOK POSSIBLE,
AND WHOSE NAME WILL IN THE FUTURE BE
LINKED WITH THAT OF DAVID SCOTT MITCHELL

PREFACE

WHEN I undertook the writing of an essay on Conrad
Martens and his times, I expected to make, not an
addition to the already large volume of art-criticism,
but a simple contribution to the history of Australian
art. Gradually, as the hidden treasures of the Dixson and other
collections came to light, and Martens' own diaries and letters
brought me into closer touch with the man himself, my interest
quickened ; for I saw that here was an artist who had been
hampered by the necessity of doing topographical work for a
livelihood, yet had revealed in half a dozen masterpieces the
natural bent of his talent and a rare instinct for his medium.
Had Martens remained in England, 1 believe that — urged
by ambition and fortified by contemporary standards of work-
he would have left a name high amongst the water-colourists
of his day. It was his fate, happily for us, to be the Pilgrim
Father of art at the Antipodes, and to lay the corner stone
of our Landscape Art.

I wish to express my thanks for much valuable assistance
in the preparation of this book : To Mr. William Dixson,
for carefully collected data concerning Martens' life ; Mr.
G. V. F. Mann, Director of the National Gallery of New South
Wales, whose knowledge of Martens* work is second to none,
and with whom I shared the pleasure of selecting from the mass
of it the pictures reproduced here ; the Trustees of the National
Gallery and the Mitchell Library ; Miss Macarthur Onslow, Miss
Combes, Miss Rose Scott, and Messrs. W. H. Ifould, Hugh
Wright, J. J. Quinn, W. H. Hargraves, C. H. Bertie, Neville
W. Cayley and Joseph Pearson.

Messrs. Hartland and Hyde have made the engravings, and
Messrs. W. C. Penfold and Co. Ltd. have printed them, with
their accustomed skill and care.

Lionel Lindsay.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

COLOUR PLATES

Portrait of Conrad Martens (Frontispiece) PLATE

Sydney from Vaucluse in 1864 - I

High Tor, Dartmoor, England - II

Sydney Harbour from Point Piper, in 1866 III

Sydney Cove (Circular Quay) in 1842 IV

Landscape - V

Moonlight - - VI

The Five Islands, South Coast, New South Wales - vil

Sydney from St. Leonards in 1841 - VIII

View from Mt. Wingen (the "Burning Mountain") - ix
Bay of Islands, New Zealand, from the Hill of

Kororareka in 1 835 X

Sydney from Lavender Bay XI

Sydney Heads from above Balmoral - - xil

Dawes Point, Sydney XIII

Dawn XIV

Bridge Street, Sydney, in 1835 - XV

View in Sydney Harbour - XVI

Hartley Stockade, New South Wales - XVII

The Wave XVIII

Sydney Harbour from the site of the Mitchell Library xix

The Heads from Point Piper, Sydney XX

Elizabeth Farm, Parramatta, New South Wales - xxi

Barco Creek, New South Wales, in 1835 - XXII

The Darling Downs near Killarney, Queensland - XXIII

Brisbane in 1852 - XXIV

Rushcutters Bay, Sydney, from Darlinghurst in 1841 - XXV
Mounts Keira and Kembla, New South Wales, from

the South Coast Road XXVI

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

COLOUR PLATES (continued)

PLATE

Mount Dumaresq, Darling Downs, Queensland - XXVII

Papeete Harbour, Tahiti, in 1835 XXVIII

Crown Ridge, Blue Mountains, New South Wales - XXIX

Sydney from Potts Point - XXX
Jamison Valley, New South Wales, looking towards

King's Tableland - XXXl

Sunset XXXII

SEPIA DRAWINGS

An Old-time Cottage, North Sydney, 1844 XXXIII

Romantic Landscape - - XXXIV

Landscape Composition XXXV

Harbour Piece - - XXXVI

Romantic Landscape - - XXXVII

On the Foreshores, Sydney - XXXVIII

View from the Domain, Sydney - XXXIX

View near Gosford, New South Wales XL

View in Tahiti - XLl

Near Coogee, New South Wales XLII
Mount Greville, Clarence River District, New South

Wales - XLlll

Fort Macquarie, Sydney XLIV

PENCIL DRAWINGS

Sir Richard Bourke's Statue, Sydney, 1847 XLV

View of Parramatta, New South Wales, in 1837 XLVI

Zig-Zag Descent into Lithgow Valley, N.S.W., in 1873 XLVII

Railway Viaducts, Blue Mountains, in 1873 - - XLVII1

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PENCIL DRAWINGS (continued)

PLATE

Sydney from Mosman, in 1841 - XLIX

Rose Bay, Sydney, 1841 L

North Head from Middle Harbour, 1866 LI

Macquarie Place, Sydney - L"

Sydney Harbour from Kirribilli, 1852 LIH

Entrance Hall, Government House, Sydney LIV

Brisbane in 1851 LV

Landing Place, Ipswich, Queensland, in 1851 - LVI

Sydney from Kirribilli in 1852 - LVIl

The Domain, Sydney, in 1844 LVIII

House at Kororareka (Russell), New Zealand, 1835 - LIX

Middle Harbour, Sydney, 1856 - LX

IN THE TEXT

PAGE

The Artist's Painting Room at St. Leonards -

West Front of the Cottage, from the Painting Room - 1 8

Facsimile of Letter to Charles Darwin (Dixson Collection) 3

THE LIFE OF CONRAD MARTENS

OF the parentage and birth of Conrad Martens we know
just this much, that his father was a Hamburg merchant
settled and married in England, and that he was born
in the parish of the Crutched Friars, near the Tower, in
the year 1801.

He had two brothers, Henry and J. W. (the initials alone de-
scend to us), and a sister, Mary Ann. The brothers Martens, like
the Fieldings, all became artists. Henry was known as " Battle
Martens," from his subjects pitched amidst " the noise of the
captains and the shouting." The only work by him that I have
seen is a French landscape, with some figures and a chateau, well
drawn and delicately washed, but revealing no particular individu-
ality ; if it is representative of his work, then Conrad far out-
paced him. The other brother, J. W., made a fine lithograph of a
mill at Exmouth, from a water-colour by Conrad — they probably
contemplated a series of Devonshire Views — and in a letter to
Henry, in '49, Conrad writes : "I am glad J. W. M. is doing
well. It would be hard indeed if none of us should succeed."

Though it is mere conjecture, I conclude from the tone of his
letters and the quality of his mind that Conrad Martens received
a good conventional education. Church and State are written
large upon his thought. Precise, discreet, reticent, he preserves
the ideal of the gentleman. Everything suggests that he enjoyed
a good middle class home. That the father permitted his three
sons to engage in the hazardous business of art speaks either for
his indulgence or for his breadth of mind.

Conrad chose for his master Copley Fielding, the most fashion-
able teacher of the day, under whose tuition he laid the foundations
of his style. Until 1837 Fielding's studio was at No. 26 Newman
Street, and there Martens first learnt the mystery of washing-in a
drawing. In his Lecture upon Landscape Painting,* delivered at the
Australian Library in 1 856, Martens not only gives us his concept
of art, with many practical hints for its realization, but names the
* MS. in Mitchell Library, Sydney.

THE LIFE OF CONRAD MARTENS

masters of his predilection and throws some side-lights on the
enthusiasms of his student days. He praises Danby, Turner,
Stanfield, Cox, Cattermole and Copley Fielding : " Cox, above all,
for his wonderful faithfulness in colour, form and texture " ; and
Turner's Liber Studiorum — " a book to be studied with the greatest
advantage. Here will be found breadth, grandeur, and a total
absence of all petty details." In speaking of the angle of vision
that may be included by the painter, the astronomer in Martens
warms to the theme. " Fifty-five degrees of the circle," he states,
" is the most that should be included from left to right of the
subject " ; and he gives the rule, saying it can always be found by
holding up the paper before your eyes at a distance equal to its
width. " Taking now ... a smaller angle, say forty degrees,
for the extent of the picture, grandeur and magnitude will be the
result, without in the least departing from the truth ....
And I may here take the opportunity to add that this was one
of the first practical lessons which I myself learnt by carefully
comparing the drawings of Turner with the scenes which he
represented."

He was, then, familiar with the work of Turner and the men of
the Old Water-colour Society, had followed up their exhibitions
and was intimately acquainted with their finest tradition ; and this
went with him overseas when chance brought him to Australia.

Upon the father's death the family left London and settled in
Devonshire ; and the many sketches made by Conrad and dated
at Exmouth point to that town as its place of stay. Martens
sketched along the coast and in the neighbouring villages, affecting
particularly Salcombe Castle, which he approached from more
than one angle. These sketches are clear but conventional, and
from a careful study of them I have come to conclude either that
it was towards his twenties, or within them, that he went to
Fielding, or that he was one of those who develop slowly and
" arrive " late.

His last drawing made in England is a pencil sketch of Marly,
the seat of Sir G. Broderick, dated the 1st of March, 1832, and in
August of the same year he is at Monte Video, come thither from
Rio. What breath of adventure blew Martens to South America

^^ /^^c^o^t^T"

substantiate
,of H.M.S.
it vessel to
he Hyadnlh
ens was in
I the same
:he place of
ly a recur-
Dm being of

?o forgotten
:e on board
lout pay, to

del Fuego.

Beagle has

has deter-

e same.

B, and many

mr Onslow,

collections,
m his work
m as typical
th the point
pical forest,
s, and other
:ss in figure
iracter for a
g quickened
is improved

paraiso, and
/ith Darwin
ded, for the
it years later
iscord. For
y about The

sters of 1
husiasms
nfield, Cc

his wonc
rner's Lib
vantage,
sence of £
t may be
rms to th
i the mo:
jject " ; a
ding up i
1th. "T

the exter
ult, withe
id I may

the first
nparing t
•resented.
He was, t
: Old We
i was inti
nt with h
Upon the
ivonshire

Exmoutr:
;tched ale
rticularly
in one an
im a caref
was tows
;lding, or
irrive " la
His last c
t seat of I
igust of t
o. Whal

3 V

*^C- *. '

THE LIFE OF CONRAD MARTENS

we shall probably never know. Official reports do not substantiate
the rumour that " being offered by Captain Blackwood, of H.M.S.
Hyacinth, the opportunity of a cruise, he sailed in that vessel to
Rio," for Captain Blackwood was not appointed to the Hyacinth
until a year later. However he came there, Martens was in
Monte Video in August, 1 832 ; the Beagle arrived the same
month, and he joined it as topographer. He took the place of
Augustus Earle, whose continual ill-health — probably a recur-
rence of fever caught in India — had prevented him from being of
much practical use to the expedition.

The voyage of the Beagle would have been long ago forgotten
by all except learned geographers but for the presence on board
of that great naturalist Charles Darwin, attached, without pay, to
Captain Fitz Roy's survey of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego.
Darwin wrote in his Journal :* " The voyage of the Beagle has
been by far the most important event in my life, and has deter-
mined my whole career." Martens might have said the same.

Martens remained on board the Beagle for two years, and many
sketch-books, now in the possession of Miss Macarthur Onslow,
and numerous sketches in the Mitchell and Dixson collections,
attest the good use he made of his time. Apart from his work
as topographer, he sketched everything that struck him as typical
and peculiar, and was never tired of disentangling, with the point
of his pencil, the luxurious undergrowth of the tropical forest.
It is true that his sketches of Chileans and Patagonians, and other
specimens of Adam's small fry, find out his weakness in figure
drawing — though he preserves sufficient of native character for a
scientific record ; but this constant habit of sketching quickened
his eye and hand, and we can see how much he has improved
upon his English work.

On the 23rd of July, 1 834, the Beagle arrived at Valparaiso, and
Martens left her. The suggestion that a quarrel with Darwin
was the cause of his leaving seems altogether unfounded, for the
tone of a letter he wrote to the great man twenty-eight years later
is cordial and pleasant, and suggests no previous discord. For
Martens, the letter is a gay one. He jokes discreetly about The
* Darwin, Journal during the Voyage of H.M.S. "Beagle."

THE LIFE OF CONRAD MARTENS

}rigin of Species and the mountains of the moon : " But," he
ids, " I must apologize, for I suppose you don't laugh at non-
;nse now as you used to do in the Beagle ; or, rather, I suppose
onsense does not come in your way. Well, that was a jolly
•uise, and I hope you have been well and happy ever since." In
1 probability Captain Fitz Roy's abandonment of the Beagle's
>nsort, the Adventure, on account of her unseaworthiness, was
ic cause of Martens' leaving. The Adventure was sold ; the
ersonnel of both ships had to be accommodated on the larger
*ssel, and all supernumeraries would naturally be dispensed
ith.

Martens stayed in Valparaiso until the 3rd of December, 1834,
hen he sailed in the Peruvian, an American schooner of ninety
»ns burthen, for Tahiti. Here he remained for seven weeks
^etching, and I think he long cherished a memory of that en-
lanted isle, for he often returned to these sketches for subject
latter. But the enchantment of the South Seas is not matter for
ic painter ; it can only be a subject for literature, and has best been
sualized by Herman Melville, by Robert Louis Stevenson, and
y Rupert Brooke. In one of his letters from Tahiti,* the English
oet who lies on Scyros, dead at the age of Keats, writes : " I've
>und the most ideal place in the world to live and work in — a
ide verandah over a blue lagoon, a wooden pier with deep clear
ater for diving, and coloured fish that swim between your toes,
here also swim between your toes, more or less, scores of
ughing brown babies from two years to fourteen. Canoes and
aats, rivers, fishing with spear, net and line, the most wonderful
>od in the world — strange fishes and vegetables perfectly cooked,
urope slides from me terrifyingly." You cannot put that into a
icture, because it is exotic colour and sensation. The word may
/oke a picture ; the painted picture will be but a theatrical set
:ene — and this, I fear, must be the verdict on Martens' Tahiti
ater-colours. Martens left Tahiti on the 4th of March in the
lack Warrior, of Salem. She made the Bay of Islands, New
.ealand, in a month, stayed five days, and then continued her
oyage to Sydney, Martens making his first sketch of the Heads
* Marsh, Rupert Brooke: a Memoir, p- 107.

THE LIFE OF CONRAD MARTENS

(and a good sketch, too) on that seventeenth day of April, 1835,
when he sailed into the Harbour whose pictorial quality he was
to be the first to discover.

When he landed, Sydney had changed but little from the town
described by Judge Therry* in 1829. " Sydney," wrote the Judge,
" then contained about 1 5,000 inhabitants. The streets were
wide, well laid out, and clean. Two regiments — the 39th and
57th — the headquarters stationed in Sydney, were then on duty
in the Colony. This considerable regimental force, with a large
commissariat establishment, imparted quite a military aspect to
the place. The houses were, for the most part, built in the
English style, the shops well stocked, and the people one met in
the streets presented the comfortable appearance of a prosperous
community. The cages with parrots and cockatoos, that hung
from every shop-door, formed the first feature that reminded me
I was no longer in England .... Ground was not then
so valuable there as it soon afterwards became, and commodious
verandahed cottages, around which English roses clustered, with
large gardens, were scattered through the town. There was
scarcely a house without a flower-plat in front. A band of one
of the regiments, around which a well-dressed group had gathered,
was playing in the barrack-yard, and every object that presented
itself favoured the impression that one had come amongst a gay

and prosperous community When, however, day

dawned in Sydney, the delusion of the evening was dispelled.
Early in the morning the gates of the convict prison were thrown
open, and several hundred convicts were marched out in regi-
mental file and distributed amongst the several public works in
and about the town. As they passed along — the chains clanking
at their heels — the patchwork dress of coarse grey and yellow
cloth, marked with the Government brand, in which they were
paraded — the downcast countenances — and the whole appearance
of the men, exhibited a truly painful picture. Nor was it much
improved throughout the day, as one met bands of them in
detachments of twenty yoked to waggons laden with gravel and
stones, which they wheeled through the streets ; in this and in
* Therry, Reminiscences oj Thirty Yean in N.S.W. and Victoria, p. 39.

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.

THE LIFE OF CONRAD MARTENS

He was early alive to the landscape interest about him, "minut-
ing," as Horace Walpole has it, all points of interest that he
happened upon. The habit of the topographer and the necessity
of preparing work for a very hypothetical market soon drove him
afield. As early as 1835 he was in the Illawarra, drawing with a
meticulous touch all that sub-tropical forest growth of tangled
lianas, great fronded ferns and graceful cabbage-palms which
attracted the romantic Englishman in him, and which, on paper,
wears so much the appearance of a transformation scene. The
exotic was ever the poorest material for art : it is only the things
we understand, woven in the texture of our lives, that can make
a true appeal to our emotions.

In those good conservative times no young lady's education was
considered finished unless she had taken lessons in drawing,
acquired the Fielding touch for trees, and learnt to decorate the
albums of her friends with insipid reminiscences of the " Keep-
sake." So Martens set up shop to instruct those " over whom
time spent was time lost." His advertisement in the Sydney
Herald says that he "will be happy to give instructions in the
different branches of Landscape Painting, Sketching, etc. Terms
may be known and specimens seen at the artist's residence,
Cumberland Street, near the Fort."

Ah, those poor drawing masters ! teaching stupid fingers to
make copies of their own works, and retouching the poor effort
to a likely conclusion, that papa and mamma might dwell with
pride on the cleverness of their progeny. Which — for the Graces
must be served — did they consider most essential to the finishing
of Miss — Drawing Master, Dancing Master, Pianoforte Mistress ?
I am afraid, not the Drawing Master.

French influence has changed our methods of teaching, and
to-day our attack is directed straight at nature. In Martens' day
the pupil approached it in an indirect way, by copying his
master's studies, and when he had acquired sufficient handling —
that recondite handling so aptly described by Samuel Butler as
" the hieroglyph of a lost soul " —he was allowed to let fly into
the " brown " of nature, before he had learnt the mere A E 1C of
observation.

THE LIFE OF CONRAD MARTENS

Martens must have been a good teacher, for he was thoroughly
grounded in the practice of the day. He was master of a fine
understanding — the clarity with which he develops his ideas on
art, in the Lecture, is enough to attest it. He was curious of the
methods and tricks of his trade — witness his inveterate habit of
note-taking, and his pleasure in a good workshop receipt ; and as
he was honest, straightforward, and circumspect, we may rest
assured that whatever knowledge he possessed was at the service
of his pupils.

Teachers were better paid then than now. Turner and Der
Wint had begun with five shillings an hour for private pupils,
and ended by charging a guinea. We do not know what those
colonial worshippers of Apollo paid Martens ; but, with his cre-
dentials and qualifications, he must have earned creditable fees,
for he was in a position to marry as early as 1837. The lady of
his choice was Jane Brackenbury Carter, daughter of William
Carter, sometime Sheriff and later Registrar-General of the
Colony : she survived her husband by sixteen years. Two chil-
dren were born to them while in Cumberland Street, Rebecca
in 1 838 and Elizabeth in the following year.

This young family must have considerably strained the artist's
resources, so to add to them he hit upon an excellent expedient.
There had never been a good general view of Sydney accessible
to the public. This, as Martens saw, was his golden oppor-
tunity, and he designed the well-known view from North Shore,
of which so many examples are still in existence. Lithography
in Sydney was so poorly executed, and suitable paper so hard
to procure, that Martens was compelled to send his design to
London, where it was transferred to the stone by a journeyman
named Boyd. The partially-tinted prints Martens wrought upon
with water-colour and body-white until they wore the appearance
of original water-colours ; and, at times, when colouring one for
a special patron, he varied his foreground. " My coloured print
continues to sell," he writes in '49. " I have, in the long run,
made a very good thing out of it. I sell none uncoloured. They
sell at a guinea, but I allow Ford and others twenty-five per cent,
if they choose to pay me cash. I do not, however, think it would

THE LIFE OF CONRAD MARTENS

be possible to raise anything like fifty pounds at this time for a
similar publication. I intend to see what can be done in litho-
graphy here ; something that would do to colour might perhaps
be got up."

In 1 854 he saw the necessity of bringing the View up to date, as
the city had altered very much in a decade ; and in June of that
year he wrote the following interesting letter to his brother Henry,
to whom he entrusted the work of overseeing its reproduction : —
" I have just been making arrangements for the publication of a
new lithograph View of Sydney, in partnership with a Mr. Mader,
who will undertake to meet all expenses. My drawing is done,
and will shortly be sent to the care of Mr. S. A. Donaldson, now
in London. He is the principal of a Sydney Mercantile house.
Mr. Mader proposes that you shall superintend the engraving, etc.,
if you are so inclined, and that whatever commission you may
think right to charge will be paid to you. The choice or selection
of a draughtsman will be left to you, as well as the printer. Mr.
Donaldson alone will be requested to find the necessary funds.
As I suppose you will have no objection to undertake the job, I
will proceed to give a few necessary directions about it. I hope,
in the first place, that as you are not restricted in the expense,
someone may be found who is more skilful than the Mr. Boyd
who made my other lithographic view. The double printing also,
I hope, may be better executed. The paper I wish to be exactly
similar to that of mine — namely, thick imperial, a sample of which
will be sent with the drawing. . . . The number of copies is
to be 500, but the stone is to be kept till further notice. No
impressions are to be left for sale in London. If it turns out well
we may get up one or two more in the same way. Once more
about the print, as the composition is not good on account of its
being too much all in one line. 1 hope the depth of the bays will
be particularly attended to, more especially on one over which I
have placed a mark /— s. It is called Farm Cove, and partly
encircles the Botanic Gardens."

Martens had made one attempt upon copper — doubtless with
the idea of multiplying saleable views — but fear of his mordant and
his timidity of line betrayed him. He had chosen a tree fern —

THE LIFE OF CONRAD MARTENS

perhaps for its detail — but the touch, for such a practised draughts-
man, is like a beginner's, and there is no feeling for the copper-
plate line. Wisely, he returned to lithography as a means
of increasing his output. Albums and books of views were
in demand with both the public and the booksellers, but, happily,
the commercial genius who thought of the picture postcard had
yet to burden the world with his invention. Long practice with
the pencil had made lithography an easy process for Martens ; it
was, besides, the current method of the sketcher for passing his
authentic touch on to his public. Cox, Prout, and Harding had
employed it successfully, and Martens, in turn, published his set
of twenty views, Sketches in the Environs of Sydney, in 1 850- 1 .
This he produced locally — to his sorrow, for the lithographs were
a poor lot and the paper likewise bad ; he must have been dis-
heartened with the result, for to hide his printers' clumsiness
(" bunglers " he called them) he was put to retouching the prints
by hand.

Colonel Mundy, at first sight of Sydney — the Sydney of the
View — in 1 846, had said : "It might be Waterford or Wapping,
with a dash of Nova Scotian Halifax."* For the truth is, the
Englishman changes readily his skies, but never his habit of mind,
and wherever he colonizes he sets up a microcosm of the Old
Land — the eating and drinking customs whereof endure here
even unto this day.

There was no Australianism before Kendall, and his influence,
at the earliest, dates from 1862. In the forties New South Wales
was still a Crown Colony, and the educated classes, naturally
enough, regarded themselves as transplanted Englishmen. It was
a good thing for Martens that so many squatters, proud of their
wealth and possessions, had built fine homesteads in imitation
of the country seats of England. Georgian architecture, with
adaptations fitting it for a warmer climate — in most cases intro-
duced by retired Indian army officers — has left this country the
richer for a tradition of good taste. The city magnates, too,
insisted upon investing their dignity with those Palladian mansions
which evoked the Gothic rage of Ruskin. Everywhere the sense
* Mundy, Our Antipodes, vol. 1, p. 38.

THE LIFE OF CONRAD MARTENS

of founding dynasties had taken possession of the first or the
wealthier families. More legitimate was the simple pride of
possession ; and as Martens was the one artist capable of doing
more than justice to the " house and the grounds," commissions
came his way. He was an honoured guest at Camden, and
fulfilled many commissions for General Macarthur. Sir Daniel
Cooper, Alexander McLeay, and Thomas Sutcliffe Mort were
amongst his city patrons ; and one well worthy of mention is the
good merchant John Brown, jun., who balanced the artist's wine
bill for twenty-six pounds twelve shillings against four pictures.
Martens had a Turnerian appreciation of old sherry, which should,
I think, be accounted to his credit.

He must have enjoyed, too, those excursions to the country,
which not only increased his material for pictures, but enabled
him also to experience new landscape sensations — a thing which
to some painters imparts a fresh forward impetus. His fecundity
on these occasions was amazing, and, as he visited many places
of interest in New South Wales, his sketches form a record that
cannot be too highly valued.

Martens never seems to have uttered a wish to return to Eng-
land, and I think his genuine love of Australian landscape held
him to his new home. To Marshall Claxton, a pretentious
painter who, for some ungodly reason, brought to Australia a
commission from Miss Burdett-Coutts to cover a canvas eighteen
feet by twelve with " Christ Blessing Little Children," he upheld
the " necessity " of preserving the character and true delineation
of Australian trees and plants, short of absolute servility.

The meticulous Mr. Fowles — who, judging from his delineation
of Sydney in 1848, might have been empowered to collect a tax
upon window-panes, so justly has he allotted each window its
share of glass — is, in his text, garrulous and vainglorious ; the
place might have been a very Paris, so nobly does he extol,
under the divine inspiration of payment for services, the Ad-
vancement of Learning and the Fine Arts. But the Fine Arts
flourished mainly in Mr. Joseph Fowles's luxuriant imagination,
though their condition was not so desperate as is hinted by the
pessimist who told Sir Robert Peel that " there are very few

THE LIFE OF CONRAD MARTENS

pictures and no artists in the Colony." Martens sets forth their
condition in the following letter to his brother Henry towards the
end of 1 849, which contains an animated picture of the times : —

" I have never known so great a depression in business of all
kinds as there is at present. The people are leaving the country
in hundreds for California by every ship that goes, and to charter
a vessel for that place is now, I believe, one of the best specs
going. When this mania will end, or how it will end, I cannot
even guess. It is true the ups and downs have always succeeded
each other in pretty quick succession, but, as the artist is perhaps
the last to feel the depression, so is he also the last to benefit by
an improvement in the times. The money will indeed be most
acceptable when it comes. I am altogether at a loss to account
for such great stagnation of business. I am certainly not inclined
to look upon emigration to California as the cause, but rather as
the effect, in part, of the want of employment in and about
Sydney, as the general intention is, I believe, not to go to the
mines, but rather to obtain the high wages reported to be given
in San Francisco. I am truly sorry to hear that you still lack
employment. I wish, indeed, that I could give you more en-
couragement to come out here, but I feel that I have said all I
dare say to you on that subject; some of which account, if in
strictness already too favourable, must be attributed to the very
natural desire of having you near us.

1 cannot help looking out somewhat anxiously for the arrival
of the cash you mention ; indeed, I should have been fairly
aground some time since had it not been for a haul of about sixty
pounds which I made by the Art-Union Exhibition, which was, I
think, about to take place when I last wrote. It was as good an
exhibition of colonial talent as I could have expected, but in all
other respects a decided failure. That is to say, firstly, the pro-
prietors of good pictures would not lend them, visitors were not
so numerous as might have been expected, and subscribers to the
Art Union did not number more than, I think, sixty-two. There
was not a single picture sold during the Exhibition; but, for-
tunately for me, the prize-holders were almost unanimous in
selections from my works, so that where I could not meet them

THE LIFE OF CONRAD MARTENS

with a picture of exactly a corresponding figure to the amount of
their ticket the balance was paid. This occurred in two instances,
and gave me an extra ten pounds, my share of the actual Art
Union subscriptions being fifty pounds. Since that time, however,
I have sold but one drawing, nor have I at present any pupils ; in
short, something else must be thought of to keep the pot boiling
till better times come round. I think I can say for certain that 1
shall not leave this place for any neighbouring colony, desirable
though it might appear to be for the time."

Without doubt, a deep affection existed between Conrad
Martens and his brother Henry. In a kindly letter to his sister
Mary Ann, who, from the context seems to have been well-to-do,
he dismisses her rosy descriptions of society at Bath — the Bath of
Mr. Bantam — with the reflexion that he would rather have word
from her that she had assisted their unfortunate brother. " Your
duty is plain," he writes, " you cannot but see it ; think not of
early indiscretions, but assist him in any way that you can ; and
if in money matters, I entreat you to do it voluntarily and in a
kind manner, for that will at once double the value of it." Henry,
characterized as " long out of employment," seems to have got
into more scrimmages than ever he put into his pictures. Pro-
bably his genre in painting had fallen out of the vaward of the
fashion, and the Peninsular War was now forgotten by all but its
veterans. Emigration seemed the only way out for him, and
Martens expected him in 1850. But his letter alone arrived, for
Henry never emigrated ; and all we know of him further is the
date of his death, 1860. The letter seems to have asked for
further particulars — as if his intention was still to " make the
plunge " — and Martens, in reply, suggested the bringing of " what
articles of crockery and hardware you might want, viz., knives and
forks, teapot and coffee ditto, or any useful things in Britannia
metal, with teacups, plates and dishes, would be a good invest-
ment. I don't know what price clothing may be in England
now, but I have to pay here, for a good well- cut pair of trousers
of what is called doeskin, made for me by the best tailor, thirty-
two shillings. Coats are of all kinds and materials now, but I
should quote them from fifty shillings upwards.

THE LIFE OF CONRAD MARTENS

"Of all drawing and painting materials it would be well to
bring a good supply; all these things are both bad and scarce.
For instance, there is not a lithographic drawing book for be-
ginners that is worth twopence to be had, nor has been for years.
Neither can I get any paper upon which to print any lithographic
sketches in all the colonies ; but I must wait till that arrives from
England which I have sent for.

. - •

• \ i? • ..'.. .VCC-

" I have done no oil painting for some time ; my painting room
is so cold in the winter that I have been obliged to retreat to
another room to draw in, but which has no light for painting. I
am, indeed, much disheartened about painting. There is no sale
for anything in that way. Small drawings and lithographs and
teaching have been of late the only way of raising a little cash.
Our exhibition has not been repeated. There is a puffing, un-

THE LIFE OF CONRAD MARTENS

principled fellow here who has been getting up what he calls Art
Unions, but I know him too well to have anything to do with him.
He gulled the public by saying that he gave prizes to the artists
for the best pictures ; but he kept the pictures, and his prizes were
in fact much below my prices. I have raffled a picture or two,
but that is disagreeable work, and now I am glad to find a
' Games and Wagers Bill ' has put a stop to anything of the kind,
Art Unions and all ; only a charter will be given when applied
for by a Society of Artists, the same as in England. In my
opinion there is not talent enough in the Colony at present to
support a thing of the kind, and therefore I do not move in the
matter. There are some chaps, however, who call themselves
artists, trying to bring about something of the kind."

In this connection another letter of the same period is interest-
ing. A Melbourne amateur, who had bought one of Martens'
pictures, sent with his cheque two pencil-drawings of his own
and a watercolour by Prout. Martens tempers the wind to the
shorn amateur by making some kindly comment on the drawings,
but accompanies it with severe criticism of the Prout, adding :
" We artists, you see, do not spare each other, whatever we say
about the performances of amateurs."

Martens' slightly caustic references to brother brushes were
quite justified. Their work was, for the most part, heavy and
amateurish : to labour with such confreres is depressing to a
man of talent, and likely to lower his standards ; and this is
one of the drawbacks from which the native-born artist still
surfers, in that he has not the incentive of great work to freshen
his inspiration, or to keep him to the mark. Happily, in the last
decade Australia has produced some men of genius who are set-
ting a standard for posterity, as well as for to-day. But Martens
is a lonely figure. Though he was recognized as the leading
artist of his day, his work in his best years brought him less
than three hundred pounds per annum, and in his worst anything
up to fifty ; so it is little wonder that he sought the refuge of a
Government billet at the age of sixty-two, when his market was
declining with his powers.

Like most men of active intelligence, he fallowed himself in

THE LIFE OF CONRAD MARTENS

hobbies, and buried the melancholy that haunts us all by finding
play for his hands. He was a capable carpenter, woodcarver
and turner ; but his master hobby was astronomy. In all his
note-books that I have examined there are, interlarded with work-
shop receipts and hints on water-colour practice, long and carefully
written extracts on the science that seems rarely to have been
far from his thoughts. From these excerpts (mostly drawn from
popular cyclopedias and from books demoded in the hour he used
them), from his boyish fondness for " the instrument " and its
paraphernalia, but chiefly from the absence of calculations, I scent
the true amateur astronomer, to whom the building of the teles-
cope is the Great Adventure ; and who hopes, not to make fresh
discoveries, but to vivify his reading by gazing enraptured on
Jupiter's moons, the Ring of Saturn, the great Nebula in Orion —
above all, to enjoy the showman's privilege of astonishing his
visitors with the real and authentic Mountains in the Moon.

Martens had yielded to the seductions of his siren shortly after
his arrival in Sydney, for in 1835 he ordered from England " A two
foot achromatic Telescope by Dolland, pancratic eye tube, tripod
stand with leather case and sling," — how rarely runs the cata-
logue ! but he had to possess himself in patience until the 7th of
March, 1838, — a cruel stretch for any amateur to wait upon the
coming of his chimera.

But he sighed for an instrument worthy of his enthusiasm, and
in 1860 set about constructing a six-inch reflector. The cast-
ing of the speculum for this telescope must have afforded our
amateur Herschel unspeakable bliss. He was then at the height
of his production, and selling his work for good prices : but he
must have enjoyed the break; for what in the world is more
pleasant than to steal from the continuity of well-paid work, to
play truant with the doxy of your heart ? Martens failed in his
first essay — the speculum cracking as it cooled — but succeeded
in his third attempt by adding arsenic to the zinc and copper.
Follows thereon the grand business of grinding and polishing, and
in a kind of ecstasy he noted down (and underlined) " Babbage,
Dictionary^ of Manufactures. Good Hints upon Speculum
Polishing."

THE LIFE OF CONRAD MARTENS

A careful drawing of Miss Herschel's " Sweeper " seems to
indicate his working model ; that the telescope was successfully
finished is clearly set out in his letter to Darwin, where he says " I
got him (Ross, the optician) to make two eye-pieces for a
reflector telescope just before he died, two metals for which I had
succeeded in making, of six and seven feet focal length, and
so now I can show the good people here the Mountains in the
Moon turned upside down, as of course they ought to be when
seen from the Antipodes."

The passion for astronomy has, I think, waned lang syne, and
the diadochi of the earnest, elderly gentlemen who sat up with
the stars in frozen solitude have all retired into golf clubs. But
in Martens' lifetime the Victorian era found much to marvel at in
the discoveries of her true high priests, the men of science ;
and astronomical literature, from the rhapsodies of the Rev.
Thomas Dick to the discreet lyrism of Proctor and Flammarion,
wore some of the trappings of Romance — the Romance of Time
and Space. The continuity of optical discoveries was also an
incentive. Nations contended for the proprietorship of the largest
telescope — even Melbourne made a bid for supremacy — and
comets and the canals in Mars were good newspaper copy.

A sort of finality seems — as in the case of the safety bicycle —
to have been reached in the Lick telescope ; that mammoth height
once touched, there could be but decline ; and popular astro-
nomy is no more to us nowadays than so much archery. Yet, I
sometimes wonder what became of Conrad Martens' telescope.
To what dusty and forgotten limbo has it descended, with
its speculum tarnished and pitted, and its gear awry ? How fitly
would it grace some museum of Australian antiques, to show the
curious how a hard-working artist beguiled his scant hours of
leisure in the sixties of last century !

He had still another hobby, if I may be allowed the word — his
Church ; and a staunch old-fashioned churchman was he — one to
whom the idea of Church and State was inviolable as the Thirty-
nine Articles, and who would not endanger his belief by putting
any strain upon its cohesions. His admission that he had no
intention of reading the Origin of Species has a certain naive charm.

THE LIFE OF CONRAD MARTENS

Sooner would he peruse The World's Birthday of Gaussen than
traffic with radical and revolutionary ideas, so likely to upset —
such is the diabolical power of reason ! — the simple conscience
of an old conservative.

He was one of the churchwardens of St. Thomas's, North
Sydney. Had he not helped to collect money for its renovation,
and carved the font with his own hands ? Such service must
have added to his sense of proprietorship — for it is the act of
giving which binds us to the receiver — and when he graced
the foreground of a North Shore landscape with the old church,
it was with an intimate pleasure that he traced its familiar form.

%*foi

Martens had removed to St. Leonards, as the North Shore was
then called, in 1844. In the previous year he had built a cottage
there on five acres belonging to his wife — now the site of the
home of the Apostolic Delegate. The land was of the poorest
description, fit, Mrs. Martens used to say, only for the growing
of cactus. Here a son, William Conrad, was born on the 1 1 th

THE LIFE OF CONRAD MARTENS

of March, 1844, but lived only six weeks. He was buried in
the garden, but afterwards properly bestowed in the cemetery.

Martens dwelt at St. Leonards for the remainder of his life,
retaining his studio in Mort's Buildings for purposes of business
as late as '56. He taught his daughter Rebecca to paint ;
but her work is a weak imitation of his own, lacking touch and
insight. Both his girls had grown up, but neither married.
Elizabeth died in 1 870 ; Rebecca survived both parents, and died
in 1909. I fancy that, as in most mid- Victorian homes where
respectability leaned upon a straitened income, life at St.
Leonards must have been quiet, sad and a little depressed.

In 1863, on the recommendation of his friend Alexander Berry,
he was appointed Assistant Parliamentary Librarian. Doubtless
he felt that, though his working days were nearly over, he was
well fitted for the position by reason of his love and knowledge of
books. Writing in '67 to an English friend, he says of it : " My
present occupation, I am happy to say, suits me well, as it enforces
a certain amount of exercise. I have now but little time for
painting. The few hours which I spend at home in the day are
frequently employed in little domestic matters, and I must own
that now, after the journey to Sydney and back, I feel a positive
pleasure in sitting still — I mean quite still, doing nothing, especi-
ally during the present hot weather, which is sometimes very
relaxing. Mrs. Martens takes a regular siesta, and I can do that
too, sometimes, with the help of a book." It is a pleasure to
think that the old man enjoyed his quiet work in the Library.
He asked for a retiring pension in June, 1878, having suffered
long from angina pectoris. There is something pathetic in this
appeal less than three months before his death, but it was not
granted, and he died on the 21st August, 1878.

His long and honourable life had been uneventful as the lives
of most artists — preoccupied, as they must needs be, with but two
problems, their bread and their art. It was his destiny to be the
first artist to make here a tradition in landscape, and Sydney
must ever esteem his memory, for he was her first painter-
lover. Never did lover pay to the beauty of his mistress a
more untiring homage.

THE ART OF CONRAD MARTENS

WHEN Tom Girtin destroyed the mean tradition of the
tinted monotone by bringing in the direct method of
laying a wash of colour truly in its place, he had dis-
covered a new art — the English art of water-colour.
English it was in origin, English it has remained in practice ; for
in vain do we look abroad for any master, outside the brilliant
Spaniard, Fortuny, who comes within coo-ee of our own. Girtin,
Turner, Cotman, De Wint, Cox, Barrett, and Copley Fielding ex-
ploited all the possibilities of the medium, and in Turner's Battle
of Fort Rocl^, exhibited at the Academy in 1815, may be seen
practically every method of handling used to-day. All these great
English masters were born between 1775 and 1 790, and Conrad
Martens came into a world of art still astir with their discoveries.

It must have been predilection that took Martens for tuition to
Copley Fielding, for his attachment to nature, and a certain turn of
elegance in his style, indicate some affinity of taste ; this, rather
than the persistence of a master's influence, which a genuine
artist must have in the course of his evolution modified and
absorbed into a personal style.

Anthony Vandyke Copley Fielding, for many years President of
the Old Water-colour Society, was a pleasant and courtly gentle-
man— a kind of minor Sir Thomas Lawrence. He was successful
early, and remained so to the end of his life ; but — alas for instant
popularity ! — his work is not esteemed so highly now as in his
own day. Ruskin rates him for not studying sufficiently with his
pencil, and for trusting to the virtuosity of his brush — a fault of
which his pupil was never guilty. " Fielding's professional life,"
says old Roget,* " was spent in sketching, painting in the studio,
and giving lessons to pupils. But the last two of these occupa-
tions engrossed more of his time than of theirs ; for, sooth to say,
a large class, though not nearly all, of Fielding's works, beautiful
as they were, had the air more of models of art than guides to
* Roget, Hislory of the Old Walcr-colour Society, vol. 2, p. 74.

THE ART OF CONRAD MARTENS

nature. As compared with those of the brother painters with
whom his name is always associated, the President's works were,
in his own day, the most popular of all. His were eagerly pur-
chased, while those even of David Cox were often returned from
the gallery unsold."

ThoughTime, in the most equitable spirit of revenge, has reversed
much contemporary opinion, and done justice to De Wint and the
great, neglected Cotman, the ready elegance of Copley Fielding's
draughtsmanship remains, and he has to his credit " the invention
of the Downs in art." This Sussex work Ruskin praises with his
accustomed beauty of style ; but it must be remembered that
Ruskin loved all draughtsmen of line, and ever preferred the artist
who elevated his theme to him who simply rendered simple nature.
Of Fielding he says, in one of his Oxford lectures : "The depth of
far distant brightness, freshness and mystery of morning air, with
which Copley Fielding used to invest the ridges of the South
Downs as they rose out of the Sussex champaign, remains, and I
believe must ever remain insuperable, while his sense of beauty in
the cloud forms associated with the higher mountains enabled him
to invest the comparatively modest scenery of our own island —
out of which he never travelled — with a charm seldom attained by
the most ambitious painters of Alp or Apennine."

Fielding painted also the mountain and lake scenery of the
North of England, and typical seascapes with shipping ; and in all
these his pupil displayed a like interest, though he had later to
deal with them under very different conditions of colour and light.
Martens must have been a consistent worker, for his Devonshire
sketches reveal a will to master his craft and a delight in outdoor
sketching for its own sake. A sound training in the practice of the
day had made him a good craftsman ; he had early learnt to lay a
wash with precision, and to handle pigments with some sense of
their specific differences. In general, his English work is small in
size, and characterized by care and neatness, as if he still must
feel his way, dependent on a knowledge of form and colour not
yet ample enough for a larger essay. He is still dominated by
the drawing-master's angle of vision. The ruined castle, the old
water-mill with attendant reflections, and the tree groups that

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

THE ART OF CONRAD MARTENS

is a singular pleasure to look over the numberless drawings
Martens made of distant Sydney : the sureness with which he
places each building and tree-mass, and the swiftness of the
touch, have an inimitable grace ; and we come to see that in
abandoning the pencil (which, it is to be remembered, was Turner's
preference) the modern artist has lost much of his power over
form and natural perspective.

I cannot sufficiently praise Conrad Martens' dexterity with the
pencil. As a sketcher, he is supreme in swift execution and
direction of touch. Mrs. Macarthur Onslow, whom he taught,
has left it on record that he never lifted pencil from paper, so
quickly did he grip the essentials of any scene. His drawing of
distances and middle-distances could not be bettered, so accurately
did his eye gauge the lie of the country and the character of hill
and valley. There is never the slightest confusion, because he was
master of his method, which was to employ four deliberate
strengths of line — " no hatching, as it is a slow process " — and to
depend on these for perspective and representation. The advan-
tages of such a method are obvious : a fine style results from
limitation of means, and the clear study, comprehensive and truth-
ful, will leave the artist free to select and amplify when he comes
to the final consideration of colour — for Martens followed the
Turnerian tradition of painting from his pencil drawings, aided
by an occasional colour-note and by written memoranda of land-
scape " effects."

Conrad Martens was a product of the thought and taste of the
days of his youth. He had by heart Reynolds' Discourses, the
Composition and Light and Shade in Painting of John Burnet, and
the Landscape Maxims of John Varley ; the Turnerian Elevation of
Theme was part of his mental texture, just as we to-day are un-
consciously subject to the influences of French landscape. Only
when his work is seen in its due relation to those ideas which
were his currency can we form a just estimate of his art. In the
first place we must dismiss from our minds all exactitudes of value
and colouring, and all local colour reactions, and consider his work

THE ART OF CONRAD MARTENS

from the standpoint of design and draughtsmanship, of chiaro-
scuro and harmony. Then, if we have any love for that monu-
ment of the art of landscape engraving, the England and Wales of
Turner, we shall surely find a niche in our hearts for the work of
Conrad Martens.

The nineteenth century is strewn with the wreckage of artistic
wars. With the French Revolution passed not merely the old
traditional monarchy but the old traditional painting : and, as
upon the one, so upon the other followed wars and riots. The
struggles between Science and Religion were accompanied by
as many battles for artistic beliefs ; even to-day the Realist would
burn William Blake and Turner at the stake, and the Pre-
Raphaelite regards the Impressionist as the Beast from the Pit,
while the Impressionist looks upon his adversary much as would
great Falstaff upon all who would banish good honest sack. As for
the Futurist, who is the Bolshevist in Art, he flings his stupid dyna-
mite with the impartial tolerance of a madman, and would immo-
late them all.

In this nook of the Antipodes Conrad Martens hardly took
note of these wars and rumours of wars : he had to settle down to
the earning of a livelihood, and the difficulties of handling an alien
landscape in which he had neither guide nor exemplar. That he
did not succeed in mastering the gum-tree is not to his discredit, for
the problem could not be solved by his method. He learned to
draw the trunk and generalized shape of the tree, but he did not
perceive — what it took the combined genius of a Heysen and a
Streeton to resolve — that the gum is visually aflat tree and, un-
like the oak or fir, has little volume ; that its character lies
in silhouette, in the true generalization of its mass, and not in
shifting light and shadow. Realism alone could analyse those
greys and bronzes, that metallic sheen and play of light on pen-
dant leaves : and Martens was not a realist.

The characteristics of a new land are not to be learned in
a generation, for the eye of the immigrant will be caught by the
unfamiliar, the unexpected, not by that which is general to the
country. The bottle-tree, the " blackboy," the fern-tree gully, the
cabbage-palm were seized upon by our colonizing fathers in art as

THE ART OF CONRAD MARTENS

precious and typical. I cannot think that they much admired the
gum, for it interfered with all their accepted notions of tree forma-
tion. Looking at the work done by our pioneer artists, we find
little that is convincingly Australian until we come to Bouvelot,
whose Pool at Coleraine is the most admirable piece of Australian
landscape achieved by the elder men. Such a landscape is a dis-
covery in the art of seeing, and it cost Bouvelot much and
profound study before he realized it. Here we have something
which reminds us of Australia and no other land. The light
is mellow and sunny, the drawing expressive and faithful ; for
Bouvelot was dominated by the true Gallic instinct for the
verities. He has not twisted his material to a pictorial conformity,
but has divined and realized its true character.

Nicholas Chevalier was not so successful. In his Vieto of
Melbourne from the Yarra the group of trees to the right might
easily be elms, so casually has he marked their construction and
leafage. Martens drew the gum with more insight, but he was
over thirty when he landed and his touch was already formed.
In all his renderings of the gum foliage that I have seen, he gives
no more than a suggestion — in his drawings, by a flowing round
line, in his aquarelles, by an accumulation of small touches,
little blots of colour, which break up the masses and destroy that
essential shape of the gum, which Heysen alone has conquered
and handles so beautifully. And here it is interesting to note
how very few of our native-born artists have been successful with
the gum. It is only by setting free its form against the sky that
one can reveal the infinite variety of its shape within the fixed
character. In its primeval condition it is, seen close at hand,
almost unpaintable ; only where settlement has thinned and
scattered the legions, and the individual giant dominates his
fellows, does decorative space of tree and earth and sky become
material for the painter's art. No European formulae for painting
trees are of any utility here, where the sky spaces are so different
in shape and light effect, the pattern and weight of foliage so
unusual. The problem demands unflinching courage and a
student's submissiveness, without a backward glance at methods
generalized to the expression of other flora.

THE ART OF CONRAD MARTENS

I have already noted that Conrad Martens drew the bole of the
gum with care and love, and, in his middle-distances, he did
generalize its form with sufficient character ; but I feel that he is
happier when he does not bring the tree, thus treated, into his
near foreground. This does not in any way affect his status as a
landscape artist. Claude employed a generalized tree shape, let
Ruskin rate him for it as he will ; and Turner invented a tree
formula, employing dark mass and delicate receding greys to
epitomize that tree depth so difficult to render, and in actuality
conquered by the divine Corot alone. As for our own Hilder,
much as he loved the beauty of all trees, he failed to render their
individual character.

Roughly speaking, there have been three great schools of land-
scape, the Classic, the Romantic, and the Realistic — the purely
Impressionist school we can neglect for the moment as beside the
issue in considering Martens' work. The Classic style composes
by noble mass and line, the Romantic depends for its magic upon
colour and chiaroscuro, and the Realistic, whether it be the fine
truth of Ruysdael or the slavish imitation of Holman Hunt, de-
pends upon a close rendering of " things seen." '-If one puts aside
much of Martens' work which, from the exigency of commis-
sions, is of purely topographical interest, it will be seen that his
best is plainly influenced by the classical ideal. True it is that the
Turnerian tradition plays here an unmistakable part ; but how was
he to escape that dominating influence of his time ? Turner not
only overtopped and crushed his contemporaries, but established
a genre in landscape, half art, half topography, which charmed a
vast public through the medium of engraving. Turn to any of
the landscape engraving done between the twenties and fifties of
the nineteenth century, and you will see not only that Turner
swayed the topographers of his day, but that his long rule over
the style of engraving reduced his contemporaries' work for the
burin to one great common Turnerian denominator. He trained
his engravers to see the " lights," who hitherto had comprehended
only the dark end of the scale ; to render delicate distances, the
sparkle and brilliancy, which are so aptly rendered by the graven
line. That great school of landscape engraving founded and

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.

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

THE ART OF CONRAD MARTENS

are no hesitations, no misgivings ; this is his natural element.
He had noted the styles of the masters before he left England,
and through a long life was ever adding to his equipment.
Throughout his scrupulously-kept notebooks there are con-
tinuous memoranda on practice. Here, a series of restricted
palettes, how to work with four colours — black, ochre, indian red,
and cobalt — or, again, with five or six pigments ; there, particulars
of phenomena observed, the colour mixtures for clouds, the manner
in which the illusion of light at evening may be attained ;
or, again, tints for trees, the greys of distances, the composition
of shadows. He is often occupied with methods of attack, out-
lining carefully a lay-in of greys and browns, and finishing with
the primitives — but this method, if he essayed it, he certainly
abandoned, for it would have killed all richness of colour and
brilliancy of tone. Once he analyses carefully the colour of a tea
chest, giving the relative quantities, and how he may apply the
colour scheme to landscape.

His technique in water-colour varies with the size of the work
and the paper employed, and is, I think, with the notable excep-
tion of Sydney from Vaucluse and The Five Islands, at its best in
medium-sized works like the Hartley Stockade, Moonlight — a gem
that Hilder would have loved — and the Landscape (Plate V.)
with a lake in middle distance, which, in the opinion of Mr.
Hardy Wilson, Cotman might have signed with easy assurance.
In many of these it is limpid and singularly direct, and the result
is a delight to dwell upon. His method was to float three or four
already determined tints softly and purely together. The execu-
tion is invariably swift, and the hues blend without break or mud-
diness, beginning with the tint of the sky and passing through
delicate distances to the warm ochres of the foreground. Upon
this finely graded base, when dry, he superimposed his drawing.
In the larger works he washed down the tones, as recommended
by Fielding's practice, to blend and soften the tints. This " wash-
ing down" gets rid of some of the size in the paper, and conduces
to a matt effect in the skies and distance ; colour is absorbed by
the paper and atmosphere is achieved at the expense of brilliance
of tone. With a clear outline to guide him, and his inimitable pencil

THE ART OF CONRAD MARTENS

study before him, Martens next proceeded to the building of his pic-
ture, laying his flat washes of general tone and skilfully treating their
edges. Finally he individualized the forms, pulled his composition
together with infinite little touches, and finished with Chinese
white in his lights and occasional body-colour in the foreground.
This is the only weakness in his technique, for the glaze of yellow
has disappeared and left his lights naked and a little cold — as in
the smoke and sunset reflections of his Sydney Harbour, 1 866, in
the Mitchell Library. The practice of that day permitted the use
of opaque pigment ; even De Wint, purist of the medium, was at
times guilty of falling back upon its easy security. It is scarcely
necessary to say that, except in gouache, where it enters into
every component tint, a water-colour is better without this heavy
addition ; for whenever its use becomes apparent it disturbs the
technical unity of the work.

The legitimate use of white is with grey paper, as masterfully
employed by Turner in his Rivers of France. Martens was
singularly skilful in working upon such a toned base, and
some of his most delightful minor works, such as the slight
sketch Sydney from Potts Point, are executed upon bluish and grey
papers. These are never over-elaborated ; the sketch element
is preserved and the colours artfully disposed without undue
preciosity ; they have a genuinely captivating and careless charm,
and that element of grace which was one of the most constant
attendants of Conrad Martens' mind.

We have, perhaps, paid dearly for our devotion to Charles
Darwin and his Descent of Man. The materialism of the nine-
teenth century, which found its issue in the Great War, was due
not so much to the decay of the religious spirit as to man's depre-
ciation of his own — to the relegation of all things to a scientific
standard. Art has suffered immeasurably by this degrading
worship of facts ; and the Impressionist movement in painting,
once past its first decent impulse of revolt, ended by denying
to art all individuality and all emotional significance. It made
the painter a mere recorder of light and colour, an automaton
without sensibility or intelligence. A landscape was no longer,
as in the words of Amiel, " a state of soul," but a spectrum

THE ART OF CONRAD MARTENS

analysis of light stated in terms of apothecaries' paint. Modern
scientific Impressionism abolished the good demon Chiaroscuro,
and the idea of beauty in line and mass. Values were forgotten,
and the masters of old, from the great Dutchmen to Corot, might
as well have died with Babylon.

In this total abandonment of tradition for colour reaction, Im-
pressionism signed its own death warrant. In its oils, the " pure
sunlight " imprisoned in the pigment will have blackened in the
passing of a century, and the flat picture will become flatter and
duller ; nothing will awake those colour reactions when once the
morphia of Time has done its opiate work. Ghosts, and poor
dull ghosts at that, will then haunt the heavy golden frames, for
colour without form is pure sensuality and must die the death.
Beside the atmosphere of Nature — which modern painters have
been at such pains to render — there is also what the French call
an " Atmosphere of the picture," of which the Impressionists have
been frequently ignorant or unmindful. Compare a fine Dutch
landscape or a Constable with an impressionist piece by Monet,
and you will immediately be conscious that, although there is more
light in the Monet, it is all as flat as a pancake ; that everything is
treated with a fine democratic indifference ; sky, trees, or build-
ings, all are mere light and colour sensation ; there is neither such
depth nor such weight in the picture as in the work of the older
men. Composition is at an end — as for the painter's emotion,
since he has failed to convey any, we must believe it to have
been non-existent. Mere transcription, what the older men called
a " study," has long been the currency of landscape art, and the
result has been sundry documents in colour and " effects " of
light. Handling and style are finished with, for the mind loses
control in the act of copying nature. Naturalistic painters had
been mad enough to set the tints of their palettes against the
living colour of nature.

Martens was saved from any such folly by a true knowledge of
the limitations of medium. " The art of landscape painting," he
says in his Lecture, " lies not in imitating individual objects but in
imitating an effect which nature has produced with means far
beyond anything we have at command." Illusion, that was the

THE ART OF CONRAD MARTENS

goal to be won ; and that atmosphere of the picture of which I
have spoken, that skilful disposition of the content within the
frame, were the means by which alone illusion could be attained.

That he sometimes failed by forcing his medium was due to his
attempt to make weight of tone do the work of colour ; moreover,
he sometimes, in presence of the actual problems — as so often
happens to any of us — forgot the rules of his own aesthetic.
And that aesthetic is embodied in the Sydney from Vaucluse
which I have come to consider his masterpiece, the key to his
intention in landscape. Often as he essayed the theme and
charm of light, he never so completely succeeded as in this
splendid vision of Sydney Harbour. He has rested here upon a
far-off memory of Turner, as Turner had stayed himself upon
Claude. Its colour quantities he never equalled in any of
his other works, for here the colour sings. The atmosphere of
distance is rendered perfectly, the touch is generalized to the
requirement of each space and indication of form, the foreground
is the most masterly he ever executed. And the subject is one
wherein man shall take joy until light and life fail from our
planet — the setting of the sun across a noble flood of water.
The splendour that lies about departing day embodies an un-
earthly beauty — an irradiation that transfigures all nature like the
visible presence of a god, an effulgence as from the wide-flung
gates of paradise. For surely here, in such calm glory of intense
gold, man, as he brooded enraptured over the miracle of day's
decease, may well have come to ponder his own going-hence and
dream that, when his own day's light should fade, he too might
inherit such palaces of amber light and dwell for ever secure in
tranquil halls of vision.

Grace, balance, the feeling for line, a just eye for the pictorial
planes, a delicacy of touch in skies and distances — these are the
characteristics of Martens' art. His love of Nature was untiring.
He was too well-bred to " show off " in her presence, for his mind
was grave and self-respecting, and — shall I add — perhaps a little

THE ART OF CONRAD MARTENS

cold. In his finer moments he attained a singleness of effect, and
sometimes a rhythm which eludes him when his theme is too
complicated. He had a sense of the hieratic relations of the
parts of a picture ; had not the pleasure of patrons demanded a
bread-and-butter consideration, I believe he would have avoided
that " finish " and accumulation of details which was of the spirit
of his age and sanctified by the great Turner. Simplicity and the
sacrifice of the inessential are revealed in his Sydney from Vaucluse,
Dawn, Moonlight, and The Hartley Stockade. These contain that
three-fourths of tradition whose remainder, according to Charles
Whibley, is the quantum of permissible originality in all great art.
Traditionalist, conformist in art as in religion, Conrad Martens
was content with Nature's help to make his personal offering to
Beauty — content also to do his best in despite of hard times and
scanty patronage. To this integrity of mind his pencil drawings
bear witness : precise, straightforward, honest, recalling inevitably
the dictum of the great Ingres — " Drawing is the probity of art."

PLATE I.
26 i 18) in.

Sydney from Vauclme
(1864)

In the Dixson Collection
Sydney

PLATE II.
84 * SJ in.

High Tor, Dartmoor

In the Dixson Collection
Sydney

PLATE III.
25t x 17! in.

Sydney Harbour
from Point Piper (1866)
In the Mitchell Library
Sydney

IV.
31 z 12 in.

Sydney Cove

{Circular Quay in i8j2\

Oil painting in the
Dixson Collection

PLATE V.
10? i 6} in.

Landscape

In the Dixson Collection
Sydney

PLATE VI.
51 i 5 in.

Moonlight

In the Dixson Collection
Sydney

PLATE VII.

26 x 18 in.

The Five Islands
South Coast, N.S. IV.
This picture is at Camden Park
New South Wales

PLATE VIII.

26 x 18 i«.

Sydney from St. Leonards

(1841)

Oil Painting in the

Dixson Collection

Sydney

•

PLATE IX.

18 X II in.

View from Mt. Wingen
New South Wales
In the possession of
Mr. George Robertson
Sydney

The Bay of Islands
New Zealand

PLATE X.
19 i 13 in.

Oil painting in the possession of
Mr. Arthur Wigrain Allen
Sydney

PLATE XI.

191 x lOi in.

Sydney from Lavender Bay
Hand-coloured lithograph
in the Dixson Collection
Sydney

PLATE XII.
25 x 15 in.

Sydney Heads
from above Balmoral

In the National Art Gallery
of New South Wales

PLATE XIII.
I7i x Hi in.

Dawes Point, Sydney

In the possession of
Miss Edith Hill, O.B.E.
Sydney

PLATE XIV.
5J x 31 in.

Dawn

In the Dixson Collection

Sydney

PLATE XV.

26 x 18 in.

Bridge Street, Sydney

('835)

In the Dixson Collection

Sydney .

PLATE XVI.
22 > 1 1 in.

Sydney Harbour

Oil Painting in the possession of

Mr. John Young

Sydney

PLATE XVII.
14 * 91 in.

Hartley Stockade
New South Wales

In the Dixson Collection
Sydney

XVIII.
8 x 4| in.

The Wave

In the Dixson Collection
Sydney

PLATE XIX.

24 x 16 in.

Sydney Harbour
from Macquarie Street

In the possession of

Miss Eadith Walker, C.B.E.

Sydney

PLATE XX.
161 i 104 in.

The Heads
from Point Piper

In the Mitchell Library
Sydney

PLATE XXI.
26 i 18 in.

Elizabeth Farm
Parramatla

This picture is at Camden Park
New South Wales

PLATE XXII.
15 x I0i in.

Bar co Creek

New South Wales (1835)

In the possession of the

A'ighl Hon. Adrian A'uo.r, C.J.

PLATE XXIII

25 J i 18 in.

The Darling Downs
near Killarney, Q.
In the possession of
Angus and Kobertson, Ltd.

PLATE XXIV.

25« x IS in.

Brisbane in 1852

In the Mitchell Library

Sydney

PLATE XXV.
26 x 1 84 in.

Rushcutter's Bay, Sydney
from Darlinghurst (184.1)
In the possession\qf
Mr. Justin Brenan
Botvral

PLATE XXVI.
IS x 9} in.

Mounts Keira and Kembla
New South Wales,
from the South Coast Road

In the Dixson Collection
Sydney

PLATE XXVII.

172 x Hi in.

Mount Dumaresq
Darling Downs, Q.
In the possession of
Miss Edith Hill, O.B.E.
Sydney

PLATE XXVIII.

18! i 121 in.

Papeete Harbour
Tahiti (1835}

In the possession of
Mrs. Odillo Maker
Sydney

PLATE XXIX.

25 x 16} in.

Crown Ridge

Blue ^fountains, N.S. W.

In the AT He hell Library

Sydney

PLATE XXX.
10i i 6} in.

Sydney,
from Potts Point

In the Dixson Collection
Sydney

PLATE XXXI.
26 i 18 in.

Jamison Valley, N.S. W.
looking (awards
King's Tableland

This picture is at Camden Park
New South Wales

PLATE XXXII.
41 x 3 in.

Sunset

In the Dixson Collection
Sydney

An Old- time Cottage
North Sydney,

PLATE XXXIII.
II x 6 in.

In the f)i.\'son Collection
Sydney

PLATE XXXIV
9» x 6 in.

Romantic Landscape
Sepia /)i'nu'injf in the
Ilixson Collection
Sydney

PLATE XXXV.

11x6', in.

Landscape C 'omposition

Sepia Drawing in the
Dixsou Collection
Sydney

PLATE XXXVI.
10) i 7} in.

Harbour Piece

Sepia Drawing in the
Dixson Collection
Sydney

PLATE XXXVII.
101 x 6 in.

Romantic Landscape

Sepia Drawing in the
Dixson Collection
Sydney

PLATE XXXVIII.

10} x 7; in.

On the J-'on-s/wn's, Sydney
Sepia Drawing in the
Dijcson Collection
Sydney

PLATE XXXIX.
91 i 6 in.

View from the Domain

Sepia Drawing in the
Di.ison Collection
Sydney

PLATE XL.
10} > 6} in.

View near Gosford
New South Wales

Sepia Drawing in the
Dixson Collection

PLATE XLI.
11x7: in.

f'/V-fi' /';/ Tahiti

Sc/>ia Dra'innf! in the
Di.i'son Collection
Sydney

PLATE XLII.
9J x 5* in.

Near Coogee
New South Wales

Se/>ia Drawing in the
Di.vsott Collection

PLATE XLIII.
131 x 91 in.

Mount (invi/lc
Neiv South ll'alcs
Sepia Drawing in Ihc
/)i.\-son Collection

PLATE XLIV.
II i 7 in

J'orf Macquarie, Svdncv

Sepia Drawing in the
Hixson L 'ollcction

Sydney

• ^ -••'

PLATE XLV.
Hi x 7, in.

7/J^' Hotirkc Statue
Sydney (iHjj)
I'l'iicil Drawing in the
J)i.\'son Collection

f£-^*:^*?. ;'*'*'*'£;..,''-• -'..-:;..;'

:^.--. • "•'iJ-H. '3,'.*' •.,"•' !•**•-;•

-* * : K* ' -

,^;V --<"*•*- -

nrrr/vrir^T ;.f'-X- /':; V—^A

3^^i^^^^;^v*

, ••• -^feiu^

;:^44.

. / ,'_. * . _

- ' ''^iV**^!'-^^-^

.'•.'^ ^ -"-.,».

•'

• •
• •

PLATE XLVI.

II '. i 7 in.

/ /< ,v <;/ Parramatta
A'cii' Sonlli ll'a/rs, ttij?
I'fncil Drawing
in the possession of the
/>'/»/// lion. Adrian KHU.V, C.J.

fl^'iafl

1 jifp

,\ ..--W'-' ^ 'r

;|||^|m^^f^; •;

*^; -y.:,;'- ^ VSfe^^ -'W^' • /' $?**••

PLATE XLVII.
Mj i 9 in.

7/fa (irca/ /.ig-/.
Blue Mountains Kaihcav
Pencil Drawing in the
Di.vson Collection

..,;:: JH

y • *r rs~ t

*/*• • , w.'

,"•• i «r* • >- /f ''

;^:^ '^Riil:!J/J^^-

'^^' !.J tpPJp

..i- " «.• .- -T •*!& • M

!r>-^\"\-^-?:-.^::-
'- /' ~>_

PLATE XLVIII.
I4i x 9( in.

Railway \ 'iadiuts
Lithgow, JV.S.ll'.
/'enril f)rawing in the
Di.rson Collection

PLATE XLIX.
12x7.1 in.

Sydney from A/osman

I'encil Drawing in the
Di.vson Collection

t —

I- • . ._. if 1 • - *

. ,* .. . |J**» .. ^ - . .

»-^JI

T' * . -.v-H. «.si«&i.ii?*i Kliit't&.&i&iss:

PLATE L.
12x8 in.

Rose Hay, Sydney
rencil Drawing in the
Di. \~son C 'ol lection
Sydney

PLATE LI.

17 » II in.

77/c North Head, Sydney,
from Middle Harbour

In the Dixson Collection
Sydney

,i Js: >/f a * 3 -

>!.

. 511

•

^T\/^^L'^ - .' •*

• jivL(. J] - "|t r:: ^-., yfe«^

PLATE Lll.
12x7 in.

Macijitaric J'/a«', Sv
/'end/ Draii'injf in the
Mitchell Library
Sydney

i'tf^fa^//^-'-^'^ ••-:

PLATE till.
ISA > II in.

Sydney from Kirribilli
I'encil Drawing in the
Dijrson (. ollection
Sydney

PLATE LIV.
17 i II in.

The /infra tie f 1 1 all
Government House, Sydney
Pencil Drawing in the
Dixson Collection

3?^i',(

v ~. •. "^—..SSSBt:.!

Ox " f^\

ac"-^-— -~vj- ' 7

r3ti.Jl

PLATE LV.

Ill x 6! ii,

Brisbane in 1851

/'eiifil Drawing

in the possession of the

Right I Ion. Adrian A'wo.r, CJ.

PLATE LVI.
1 2 x 6-1 in.

The Landing Place

Ifisu'icli, Q. (1851)

Pencil Drau'ing

in the possession of I lie

l\' iff III /foil. Adrian A'no.r, ( './.

t -.,.- ••^'"' -t-. .

i *"J v^. ^L ^ Y «v'*';«*-- ^.-,X .!-»»>"H'!'

"V. - ^ v^ ;

•^r

PLATE LVII.
18! i 1 1 in.

Sydney Harbour
from A'irribi/li (18
I'encil Drawing in the
Di.vson C oiled ion

\ r ';

k*^l?.-

;

"^*:''.-J:'

^l*"^** " .•>. ~O

.*•', v ' ^'

' "•$& r . . v""* I „ V >•&(' '»

PLATE LVIII.
Ill x 7.' in.

The Domain, Sydiicv

(1844)

1'encil Drawing in the

tii.i-son Collection

-• • mrn^ *mnt

1 IMiPfrK *S

[LL*<^

—r7 !

,.**..*.'• .- *•

ffe

PLATE LIX.
II i 7 in.

//ouse at K'ororareka
[Xiissclt] , N.Z. in 1835

Pencil Drawing in the
Mitchell Library
Sydney

•:>; '"v

sb* •• —

PLATE LX.

17 x 10 in.

Middle Harbour (1

I't'iicil Drawing
in the possession of
Mr. Leonard />odcis
Sydney

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
LIBRARY

Internet Archive Audio

Featured

Top

Images

Featured

Top

Software

Featured

Top

Books

Featured

Top

Video

Featured

Top

Mobile Apps

Browser Extensions

Archive-It Subscription

Save Page Now

Full text of "Conrad Martens : the man and his art"

See other formats