Albert Pinkham Ryder
Albert Pinkham Ryder
1847 - 1917
American painter. He is generally considered to be America’s greatest visionary painter. His c. 160 canvases, intense in colour and pattern and often with mysterious thematic overtones, are distinctively Romantic.
Raised in the whaling community of New Bedford, MA, Ryder moved to New York with his family c. 1870. He had already begun painting landscapes. Independent in mind and inclined to learn from experimentation, he studied at the New York National Academy of Design, but only irregularly. His best instruction was received informally, from the New York portrait painter and engraver William E. Marshall (1837–1906). He adopted the habit of studying engravings and was strongly attracted to the pastoral works of recent painters, particularly those of Camille Corot and the other Barbizon painters. His own work, for example Curfew Hour (1882; New York, Met.), incorporated the earthen tonalities, simplified interlocking patterns of human, animal and landscape forms and the quiet light effects characteristic of the French painters.
Ryder first exhibited at the National Academy in 1873. As a result of this exhibition, he met Daniel Cottier (1838–91), a dealer in paintings and decorative arts, who became his dealer and gave him commissions for decorations on mirrors, cabinets and screens. (A screen of three panels is in Washington, DC, N. Mus. Amer. A.) Cottier encouraged Ryder to travel in Europe, and he made several trips—in 1877, 1882, 1887 and 1896. The trip of 1882 gave Ryder the opportunity to make a detailed study of art collections in England, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain and Tangier.
Although his earlier works are fairly naturalistic and directly painted, Ryder moved towards procedures that simplified his design but complicated his technique. He wrote for a magazine interview in 1905 that his early attempts to imitate nature in all her detail were thoroughly frustrating and that his painting did not come alive until he learnt to re-create the large forms of nature only. Increasingly Ryder’s technique relied on indirect methods, with heavy glazing and overpainting. He became a tonalist, organizing his pictures around one or two major colours. He also followed this simplicity in his designs, which came to resemble Japanese prints in their careful, planar interlocking. Contemporary critics praised the jewel-like radiance of his surfaces and the pleasing inevitability of the forms.
About 1880, Ryder turned from his concentration on pastoral themes to explore subjects with literary, biblical and Wagnerian themes. His success in these works seems in retrospect to ally him with his contemporaries the Symbolists, although his themes did not suggest the erotic or the decadent. In Jonah (1890; Washington, DC, N. Mus. Amer. A.), painted in golden browns, the heaving sea is locked into place by simplified forms representing a storm-tossed boat and a huge whale; on the horizon the brilliant gold figure of God, globe in hand, implies the satisfying resolution to come. Other works convey a sense of impending doom consonant with late 19th-century pessimism. Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens (1891; Washington, DC, N.G.A.), dominated by green and gold and designed in swirling lines, interprets the moment in Wagner’s opera when Siegfried first encounters the Rhine maidens and their terrible prophecy. Other works with such ominous overtones include: the Flying Dutchman (1887; Washington, DC, N. Mus. Amer. A.), also taken from Wagner; Temple of the Mind (1885; Buffalo, NY, Albright–Knox A.G.), inspired by Poe; Desdemona (1896; Washington, DC, Phillips Col.), from Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello; and Constance (1896; Boston, MA, Mus. F.A.), from Chaucer’s ‘Man of Law’s Tale’ in the Canterbury Tales.
Just as forest subjects were popular among the Barbizon painters and dark literary themes among the Symbolists, so Ryder was attracted to a distinguished tradition for his third major subject, the seascape. The marine paintings reflect his childhood experiences in one of the great maritime centres of the world. His Toilers of the Sea (c. 1884; New York, Met.), a work rich in dark tonalities of grey-black and greenish gold, is composed of the stark shapes of boat (with an improbably simple rigging), sea and sky. Ryder exhibited this painting with his own poem, a frequent practice of his. The painting may have had a literary inspiration, the Victor Hugo novel of the same name, published in 1866. Ryder’s fondness for marine scenes and his exhibition of his work with fragments of poetry point to the influence of J. M. W. Turner on his work.
Although Ryder was in some personal ways eccentric, he had several deep friendships with other artists, especially Julian Alden Weir. In 1877 he was one of the 22 founders of the Society of American Artists. His paintings were bought enthusiastically by major patrons such as Thomas B. Clarke, and by the end of his life, although he did not paint consistently after about 1900, his works were so popular that they were widely imitated by forgers. Ryder’s reluctance to sign and date his pictures has made verification difficult, but because he frequently repainted his canvases, modern methods of technical examination can detect many of these forgeries. Works in museum collections ostensibly by Ryder are now in the process of being reassessed and, in many instances, reattributed. Apart from the problem of forgeries, the major difficulty is that of conservation. Ryder often chose unusual media to carry his pigment and frequently painted over wet layers. Not only have almost all of his paintings needed conservation to prevent further deterioration, but by the 1930s many had already changed beyond remedy. In many instances photographs of the paintings made at the memorial exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1918 provide the only indication of the early (if not original) appearance of a work.
Several of Ryder’s paintings were shown in 1913 at the Armory Show, where they inspired a new generation of artists. The National Museum of American Art in Washington has the most important collection of his works. No known drawings are extant. [Elizabeth Johns. "Ryder, Albert Pinkham." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 11, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T074756.]
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