Old Manor of Criqueboeuf

A pale house stands behind a screen of trees, its empty-looking openings repeated in the pond below. In Old Manor of Criqueboeuf , Homer Dodge Martin gives architecture a strangely uncertain presence: the building can be recognized, but the trees, water and surrounding ground continually interrupt its outline. The landscape makes the house seem secluded even as its reflection brings it closer.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art dates the canvas about 1882–92, a range that spans Martin’s Normandy residence and later work in America. Its alternative title, The Haunted House , belongs to an early response to the scene. The main illustration here is a monochrome museum reproduction; it reveals the arrangement and tonal contrasts without recording the original paint colors. ^{[1] [2]}

A house held between trees and water

The house occupies a relatively small part of the whole canvas. Its pale walls sit within a much larger mass of trunks and foliage, with the upper branches rising well above the roof. The surrounding vegetation gives the scene its scale. Architecture offers a point of recognition inside a landscape that seems capable of closing around it.

The bank divides the picture near its middle, but the balance above and below remains unequal. The trees form a crowded upright group, while the water spreads into a broad horizontal opening. Dark ground holds the lower edge. Beyond the bank on the right, a few slender trees stand apart against the lighter sky.

Those isolated forms matter because they loosen the denser central group. Their spacing allows air and distance to enter around the house, preventing its enclosure from becoming absolute. The composition moves between compression and release: closely gathered vegetation at the center, a low open horizon to the right, and the pond extending toward the viewer.

Martin’s paintings repeatedly bring upright trees into relation with open water. Here the architecture adds a further layer. The eye seeks a familiar structure, then follows the landscape that partly conceals it.

The pool as a second image

The reflection offers another way of finding the house. Pale walls and dark openings appear beneath the bank, accompanied by downward extensions of the trees. The water repeats the principal forms while changing their clarity and continuity. It is both a broad interval before the building and a surface on which the building becomes visible again.

The Met’s scholarly catalogue identifies the pairing of actual and reflected images as one of Martin’s recurring interests. In this picture, the relationship links the house to the pond more strongly than a simple foreground setting would. The landscape’s principal object appears twice, each time partly absorbed by its surroundings. ^[2]

The water has its own divisions. Darker reflected growth occupies the area beneath the trees; lighter passages spread toward the right and lower center. The near edge curves around the pond rather than presenting a perfectly straight border. Small foreground plants interrupt the water’s breadth without becoming a competing subject.

A comparison with Harp of the Winds clarifies the difference. Both works join vertical growth to a reflective surface, but the manor’s pale walls make recognition more specific. The repeated image seems to confirm the house’s presence at the same time that the water unsettles its solidity.

Vacant openings and the crowded bank

The house’s openings are among its strongest dark accents. They are small enough to require attention, yet distinct enough to suggest rooms or passages beyond the visible walls. No clearly legible human action explains the building. The viewer encounters an exterior whose interior remains inaccessible.

Frank Jewett Mather’s 1912 discussion emphasizes the vacant windows and doors, the weathered wall and the untrimmed trees. His account reads these elements together as a landscape of abandonment. The impression of desolation is therefore part of the painting’s historical reception as well as a possible response to its visible forms. ^[8]

The trees complicate the architecture’s edges. Trunks pass before the pale wall, while darker growth almost merges with the roof and the building’s sides. One can recognize a house without being able to separate every part of it from the vegetation. That partial recognition is central to the picture’s unease.

The effect does not depend on an illustrated apparition or a dramatic incident. It develops through ordinary objects placed in a particular relation: an unoccupied-looking building, enclosing growth, a low bank and still water. Their arrangement allows the title’s suggestion to emerge gradually from close looking.

Criqueboeuf as an inhabited landscape

Elizabeth Gilbert Martin’s memoir places these subjects within the walks and friendships of their Normandy years. She describes Criqueboeuf near Villerville and Pennedepie, between Honfleur and Trouville. The church, a farm and a deserted manor provided closely associated subjects around a pond and grassy enclosure. ^[13]

Her account also describes the Hennessys’ home at Pennedepie, an old manor opposite that village’s church. This was the house where the Martins visited friends. The deserted Criqueboeuf manor was another subject; the shared word manor does not make the two buildings identical. Their different roles distinguish a welcoming household from the abandoned-looking structure in the painting. ^[13]

The memoir’s geographical setting gives the picture a life beyond its melancholy atmosphere. Martin found it in a region of villages, agricultural land, fellow painters and familiar walks. Elizabeth remembered their Villerville residence with particular affection. The motif’s solitude belongs to its pictorial treatment within that wider, inhabited world. ^[13]

France and Normandy follows this period more fully. The manor provides a concentrated example of how an accessible local subject could remain important after Martin left France. Its later development did not require the landscape to lose its geographical identity.

The Haunted House and its revisions

According to Elizabeth, Mrs. Hennessy suggested that the deserted manor seen through its ghostly trees ought to be called The Haunted House . The nickname arose from a friend’s response to the subject. Elizabeth herself used it when identifying the picture completed for Martin’s longstanding friend Dr. D. M. Stimson. ^[13]

That origin helps explain the title without turning it into a claim about local folklore. The memoir supplies a response to an evocative landscape, rather than a documented haunting. The name directs attention toward the concealment, emptiness and reflection already present in the image.

The Met catalogue records the painting at the National Academy of Design’s autumn exhibition in 1886 and traces further revisions into the early 1890s. Exhibition was therefore one stage in the work’s development. The state seen by its earliest reviewers preceded the completion associated with Stimson in 1892. ^[2]

The catalogue also reproduces an 1886 reviewer’s comparison with Hawthorne and description of an uncanny house among gaunt trees. This is evidence of an early literary response, mediated through the museum publication. It shows that the scene invited imaginative associations before Mather’s later, more extended interpretation. It does not establish that every detail of the present canvas was already in place. ^[2]

A decade-long date and the studio return

The museum’s date range preserves a history that one completion year would obscure. The subject belongs to the French residence; the painting was exhibited in 1886; and its arrangement continued to occupy Martin after his return. The Met catalogue identifies 1892 as the year he finished it for Stimson. ^{[1] [2]}

Elizabeth associates The Haunted House with his last New York studio, in Fifty-ninth Street, which he occupied from 1890 until June 1893. Her recollection links the canvas to other Normandy subjects developed there, including Normandy Trees and the church picture subsequently completed in St. Paul. ^[13]

This history matters when considering Martin’s loose handling. The Met catalogue discusses its relationship to Impressionism and compares the real-and-reflected arrangement with a contemporary Criqueboeuf church painting by Eugène Boudin. Its suggestion that Martin may have known Boudin’s work remains a proposed connection, rather than proof of contact between the painters. ^[2]

The extended revisions also complicate the idea of a fleeting outdoor impression. A landscape could retain the appearance of atmosphere and weather while being reconsidered over years. Martin’s style and technique brought observation, memory and studio judgment into a continuing relationship.

Elizabeth noticed his eyesight worsening during these last New York years. That testimony belongs to the working circumstances, but it cannot assign a medical cause to each blurred edge or dark passage. The picture’s development and artistic choices require attention alongside the biographical evidence. ^[13]

Poe in Mather’s interpretation

Mather compared the manor with Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher . His discussion links the house, the surrounding trees and the reflected building with Poe’s oppressive atmosphere and dark water. The comparison is his critical reading of the picture, not a statement by Martin naming a literary source. ^[8]

Mather did not reduce the landscape to horror. He found a composed, sorrowful feeling in the declining light and enclosing vegetation, interpreting the house as an image of departed grandeur. His account makes melancholy the governing response, even while drawing on a story associated with dread. ^[8]

Mather also describes a subdued relationship between warm browns and luminous grays, with a small red accent in the sky. These are his published observations of color, distinct from the light-and-dark information in the monochrome illustration. They suggest how a restrained palette could sustain variation within the scene’s overall gravity. His emphasis falls on related tones and a departing gleam, rather than on a sudden theatrical effect. ^[8]

The distinction is productive for looking. The stillness of the pond and the absence of a visible event can hold attention without requiring a narrative climax. The architecture remains standing, its reflection persists, and the surrounding trees continue beyond the building’s scale. A sense of duration can grow from those relationships.

Mather’s reading joins the earlier Hawthorne comparison as part of the painting’s reception. Different writers reached for literature to describe a landscape whose mood seemed unusually concentrated. Their comparisons illuminate how viewers responded; they leave room for a reader to begin again with the house, bank and water themselves. ^{[8] [2]}

The manor beside church and farm

The neighboring subjects allow a closer comparison than a general discussion of Normandy scenery. Elizabeth groups the church, farm and manor within the same local setting. Carroll’s 1913 selection includes Criqueboeuf Church as number fifty-one and Normandy Farm as number fifty-two, preserving their separate identities within Martin’s work. ^{[13] [14]}

The historical church illustration presents a more dominant building. Its tower and roof rise as a substantial mass above the water, whereas the manor’s architecture sits within a higher screen of trees. Both compositions involve reflection, but the balance between building and vegetation changes the viewer’s first point of attention.

The church painting is dated 1893 in LACMA’s current record. Its medium is oil on canvas and its dimensions are close to, though different from, those of the Met manor. These are distinct paintings whose shared locality and recurring motifs invite comparison. The illustration reproduced here comes from Carroll’s 1913 publication. ^{[10] [14]}

Together, the subjects show how one neighborhood could offer several pictorial problems. A tower establishes a strong vertical landmark; a low house behind trees depends on intermittent visibility. The surrounding water joins architecture to the foreground in each, while the different distribution of forms changes the scene’s character.

Collection history and a quiet kind of drama

The Met catalogue records Stimson’s ownership from 1892 until 1922 and the painting’s appearance at the Society of American Artists in 1892 and Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. Elizabeth’s tentative recollection of a Chicago showing is thus supported by the catalogue’s exhibition history. ^{[2] [13]}

The exhibition list also records the title The Haunted House at the Engineers’ Club in New York in 1909. The nickname continued to identify the painting after Martin’s death, alongside titles emphasizing the manor and its locality. Those different names offer complementary approaches: one begins with a place and building, the other with the feeling they prompted. Neither requires the architecture to become an illustration of a particular ghost story. ^[2]

The canvas entered the Met through Stimson’s bequest in 1922. Its collection history gives a further meaning to Elizabeth’s account of its completion for an old friend: the picture remained associated with that patron before entering a public collection. ^{[1] [2]}

Within Martin’s career, the manor brings together sustained revision, a remembered French setting and a distinctive response to architecture in landscape. Its dramatic effect remains quiet. Trees obscure a house, the pond repeats it, and the viewer moves between those two imperfect appearances. The picture’s history helps explain that concentration without exhausting the experience of looking.