Henri Martin had a deep and abiding empathy for rural laborers and the simple life of the farm. Here an older man stands in field leaning heavily on a stick. With is coat draped over his shoulder he appears to have paused to consider something immediately in front of him. The angles crated by his bent form, coat and stick form a readily discernable triangle lending the figure stability and dignity. Above and behind him the sky swirls with yellow, blue, purple and green strokes of spontaneous color. This specific Impressionist handling of the paint surface dates this painting to 1900 or so, before Martin made the transition to the abbreviated pointillist technique he would employ for the rest of his career.

While Henri Martin is heralded for his many landscape paintings, he was in fact a highly accomplished figure painter. Indeed his most ambitious works such as the large mural commissions to be found in Paris and Toulouse, contain multiple figures from all classes and walks of life: wizened men and women, young people in the prime of life and children at play fill these grand compositions. For all of his murals, Martin made numerous preliminary drawings and oil studies—a practice, no doubt, he had learned in the studio of his teacher Jean-Paul Laurens. Most of these studies were done from life, with the help of models. It appears that Martin also had a ready clientele for paintings of this type as they are most often fully signed and many contain a high degree of finish, color and elaboration.

Museum Collections Include:
Musee d’Orsay, Paris; Musee du Petit Palais, Paris; Musee des Augustins, Toulouse; Musee Henri Martin, Cahors; Musee des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux; Philadelphia Art Museum, PA; Palais des Beaux Arts, Paris; Musee d’Art Moderne, Paris; Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid; Toulouse-Lautrec Museum, Albi; Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; John G. Johnson Collection, Philadelphia; Telfair Academy of Arts & Science, Savannah; National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo; Musee Bonnat, Bayonne; Musee des Beaux-Arts, Nantes; Musee du Luxembourg, Paris