Martha Jackson

Quick Facts

• Role: Pioneering mid-20th-century New York art dealer and gallery owner; linchpin of the 1950s timeline
• First appearance: When her maid, Annie, brings an old family horse painting to her apartment/gallery
• Occupation: Founder of a contemporary gallery that grows from a single room (where she literally sleeps in an alcove) into a four-story space on East 69th Street
• Legacy: Her careful stewardship of the Lexington portrait ensures it survives to be studied by Jess and Theo
• Key relationships: Annie Hawthorne (maid), Lee Krasner (friend), Jackson Pollock (artist), Cyrena Case (mother, deceased)

Who They Are

Boldly independent and fiercely discerning, Martha Jackson is the novel’s most pragmatic romantic: a believer in art’s power who channels that belief into institution-building rather than self-mythologizing. She bridges the past and present when she recognizes the artistic and historical value of a 19th-century horse portrait in the very world—the avant-garde—built to reject it. In doing so, she embodies the novel’s exploration of how art transmits memory across generations, a core thread of Art, History, and Memory.

Personality & Traits

Martha’s authority comes less from physical description than from presence. The text sketches her as once “effervescent, golden-haired,” and in the 1950s marked by practical elegance—wool jacket and slacks for studio visits; a dress cinched tightly to dodge Pollock’s flying paint. These details capture a woman who refuses to dress her ambition down for a male-dominated scene and who adapts quickly and cleanly to its mess.

• Perceptive, with a “critic’s eye”: Trained by Hans Hofmann, she’s the rare dealer who can see past fashion to quality, championing the unproven—Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky—before the market approves. Her instant recognition of the Lexington portrait’s merit shows the same instinct at work across eras.
• Determined and ambitious: She sleeps in her first gallery’s alcove, then builds a four-story operation. The expansion reads not as social climbing but as infrastructure for the art she believes in.
• Principled and empathetic: She refuses to exploit Annie’s financial precarity, seeking a fair price for the painting even when her personal desire is overwhelming. She is tender-eyed toward Lee Krasner’s sacrifices and alive to the human costs behind “genius.”
• Assertive and resilient: She manages volatile artists with calm, then stands her ground with wealth and power—most notably when she coolly demands her painting back from Paul Mellon’s office after a condescending delay.

Character Journey

Martha’s arc is a study in lucid self-knowledge. At art school, Hofmann’s honest appraisal helps her accept she lacks a “painter’s hand,” but she refuses the false binary of success or abandonment. Instead, she pivots—turning disappointment into vocation—and builds a platform for others’ greatness. Her story is all momentum until the horse painting arrives, halting her forward drive with a shock of the past: Lexington’s image echoes her mother’s champion horse, and she learns Lexington is Royal Eclipse’s great-grandsire. Purchasing the 19th-century portrait—an outlier in a gallery of moderns—braids her personal grief with her professional creed. She monetizes a sports car for two Pollocks, then uses that liquidity to buy the painting from Annie at a generous price, a sequence that reveals her values: art over status, conscience over convenience, memory over trend. By safeguarding the portrait, she unknowingly preserves a lost strand of American history that future scholars will recover, proving that curation can be a moral act.

Key Relationships

• Annie Hawthorne: Their relationship sidesteps the era’s rigid hierarchies. Annie’s trust brings Martha the Lexington painting; Martha’s ethics return dignity and material security. The exchange is intimate but not transactional: Martha is compelled by the work itself and Annie’s welfare in equal measure.
• Lee Krasner: Martha sees the cost of sustaining a “great man” myth in real time. Her empathy for Lee refracts Martha’s own choices—how to support genius without erasing oneself—and underscores her insistence that women’s labor and discernment are central to the art world’s engine.
• Jackson Pollock: As an early backer, Martha navigates brilliance wrapped in self-destruction. Her practiced patience in his studio (skirt tucked, eyes open) mirrors her broader strength: validating disruptive art without being swallowed by the chaos that produced it.
• Cyrena Case (Mother): Though long dead, Cyrena’s glamour and fatal ride shadow Martha’s life. Discovering Lexington’s link to Royal Eclipse transforms the painting from collectible to reliquary. Hanging the portrait among her mother’s photographs, Martha curates her grief into coherence.

Defining Moments

Martha’s pivotal scenes reveal the principles beneath her polish—clarity, courage, and care.

• The art-school epiphany: Hofmann names her gift—“a critic’s eye.” Why it matters: It frees Martha from the vanity of authorship and reorients her toward stewardship, a role the novel treats as equally creative.
• Discovering the Lexington painting: Annie unwraps a family canvas; Martha recognizes both artistic caliber and personal resonance when she traces the horse to her mother’s champion. Why it matters: The past pierces the present, turning a dealer’s decision into an act of remembrance.
• Confronting Mellon’s office: After six weeks of silence, she demands the painting’s return from a patron’s gatekeepers. Why it matters: She asserts agency against condescension and wealth, prioritizing respect over access—even at financial cost.
• Buying the painting with integrity: She trades her sports car for Pollocks, then writes Annie a far larger check than expected. Why it matters: Martha aligns money with morals, ensuring the artwork’s future without exploiting its past.

Symbolism & Themes

Martha becomes the novel’s custodian of buried histories. As a dealer of the new, she rescues a 19th-century artifact, preserving the intertwined stories of Lexington and, by extension, the erased life of Jarret Lewis—a living instance of Hidden Histories and Erased Narratives. Her career also models Freedom and Agency: she builds a business on her own terms in a patriarchal milieu, echoing real-world pathbreakers like Mary Barr Clay. The painting she chooses is not just inventory but a way to claim and reorder a family trauma, proof that curation can heal.

Essential Quotes

"Perhaps you don’t have a painter’s hand," he told her. "I don’t know for sure. But I do know this: you have a critic’s eye. You can see what makes a painting good. That’s also a gift." This moment reframes failure as vocation. Hofmann’s blessing authorizes Martha’s pivot from making art to making meaning—validating the dealer’s eye as creative labor and setting her life’s trajectory.

She wanted the painting. She knew the girl would be more than satisfied with what she would offer. But her conscience would not let her take advantage. She knew someone who could—who almost certainly would—pay far more. The passage stages a moral test inside a market transaction. Martha’s restraint distinguishes her from predatory collectors and asserts that value—historical, personal, ethical—cannot be severed from price.

In the bedroom she hung the portrait of Lexington back on the wall between her mother’s photographs and laughed at a stray thought. "Martha Jackson, when you die, and the vultures start circling over your collection, they’re all going to look at this painting and say, What the hell is this one doing here?" Here the gallery-owner becomes a private curator, arranging a shrine where professional taste and private loss meet. The wry aside anticipates how institutions misread anomalies—while Martha knowingly keeps the anomaly that matters most.