Claude-René Martin was a French painter, wood-engraver and illustrator, the elder of the two painter sons of the great Post-Impressionist Henri Martin. Born René Jean Martin in the 14th arrondissement of Paris on 15 June 1885 — the signing name "Claude-René Martin" was his own invention — he grew up steeped in art, the son of one of the most celebrated decorative painters of the age and the elder brother of Jacques Auguste Martin, who would make his own reputation as "Jac Martin-Ferrières." To be raised between his father's Paris studio and the family's Provençal estate of Marquayrol, among the pointillist landscapes and great public murals that Henri Martin was then producing, was an artistic education in itself.
Formed in that milieu and in the figurative, Post-Impressionist tradition it embodied, Claude-René devoted himself above all to landscape. Paris and its views were his central and recurring theme, but his painting followed his travels widely: to the Basque country, the Creuse, and Brittany, where he worked at Saint-Guénolé; south to the Mediterranean and Collioure — the little Catalan port his father and the Fauves had made famous; across to North Africa; and as far as Poland, where he painted at Gdańsk (Danzig) in 1929. Alongside these landscapes he produced portraits and still lifes, working in both oil and watercolour in a warm, legible, sunlit manner that carried the family inheritance into his own generation.
He began exhibiting early and steadily, appearing at the Salon des Indépendants from 1911 and at the Salon d'Automne from 1914, and later at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. But it is as a wood-engraver and book illustrator that Claude-René Martin is perhaps most distinctive, and here he made a lasting mark. He cut the original woodblocks for a series of fine illustrated editions of the inter-war years, most notably André Malraux's La Voie royale for the celebrated collection "Le Livre moderne illustré," as well as Charles Régismanset's Le Miracle français en Asie (1922) and Georges Imann's Seize ans (1940), besides a number of illustrated children's books in Spanish for the Paris publisher Henri Didier. This graphic work, disciplined and inventive, places him among the accomplished livre d'artiste engravers of his day.
His work is preserved in French public collections, including the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris (Ruisseau dans la prairie, oil on canvas, 1929), the Fonds National d'Art Contemporain, and the Bibliothèque-Musée de l'Opéra, which holds his Portrait of Albert Roussel, the composer. He is recorded in the standard references, Bénézit and Édouard-Joseph.
