Adirondack Lake

Homer Dodge Martin was born in Albany, New York, in 1836. By 1863, he established a studio in New York, already intimately familiar with the Adirondacks, which captured the imagination of the Hudson River School painters. According to Kevin Sharp, the present work "was not a complete departure from the tradition of [Thomas] Cole, but it does bear a number of the innovations that [John Frederick] Kensett introduced...While Martin's foreground remains solid and agitated with protruding rocks and dense autumn foliage, the lake itself has already become a diffuse reflection...Martin's most direct application of the new idiom was in his treatment of the all but invisible sun, which radiates behind a screen of haze and is defined by only the slightest variation in the otherwise monochrome, yellow sky." (Wilder Image Bright: Hudson River School Paintings from the Manoogian Collection, exhibition catalogue, Vero Beach, Florida, 2004, p. 87)