Albert Pinkham Ryder
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Albert Pinkham Ryder
(born March 19, 1847, New Bedford, Mass., U.S.died March 28, 1917, Elmhurst, N.Y.) U.S. painter. Born in a fishing port, he never lost his obsession with the sea. He settled in New York City 1870 and briefly studied painting. His highly personal seascapes, including Toilers of the Sea, reflect his feeling of human helplessness against the forces of nature. Thick yellow light (usually moonlight) heightens the mood of mystery in such paintings as The Race Track and Death on a Pale Horse. He was a strikingly imaginative painter, and, though he was a solitary one, his works became well known in his lifetime.
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Albert Pinkham Ryder
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Albert Pinkham Ryder
(b New Bedford, MA, 19 March 1847; d Elmhurst, NY, 28 March 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.
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Albert Pinkham Ryder
The painter Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847-1917) was the most original romantic artist of 19th-century America. His highly personal art, at the opposite extreme from the literal naturalism of his period, anticipated the expressionist and fantastic trends of modern art.
Albert P. Ryder was born on March 19, 1847, in New Bedford, Mass., then the world's busiest whaling port. His ancestors on both his father's and mother's sides were of old Cape Cod families. Many had been sailors, and his childhood was intimately associated with the sea. His education went no further than grammar school, as his eyes were oversensitive. Without professional training he began to paint landscape outdoors.
About 1870 Ryder moved with his family to New York, where he lived the rest of his life. At 23 (relatively late) he entered the National Academy of Design, where he studied for four seasons, mostly drawing from casts; but more important was the informal teaching he received from the portraitist and romantic painter William E. Marshall. This limited art education contrasted with the thorough academic training usual at the time.
Ryder's early paintings were landscapes, often including horses, cows, and sheep - memories of the country around New Bedford. Small in scale and relatively naturalistic in style, they were already marked by a dreamlike poetry and by extremely personal form and color. They were generally rejected by academy juries, and in 1877 Ryder was one of the founders of a new liberal organization, the Society of American Artists, with which he exhibited for the next decade.
By contrast with that of most American artists of his generation, Ryder's European experience was small. His first trip abroad was in 1877, when he spent a month in London. The next and longest trip was in the summer of 1882, when he visited France, Spain, Tangier, Italy, and Switzerland. In 1887 and 1896 he crossed and recrossed the Atlantic, for the sea voyages, spending only 2 weeks in London each time. These limited foreign contacts had little effect on his art.
About 1880, in his early 30s, Ryder embarked on the imaginative paintings which were his greatest achievements. They were based on the Bible, classical mythology, Chaucer, Shakespeare (his favorite poet), and 19th-century romantics such as Lord Byron, Thomas Campbell, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Edgar Allan Poe. Two of his major paintings were based on Richard Wagner's operas. But Ryder's works were quite different from the "literary" pictures of the period. They were not illustrations but original works of art - great themes transformed by his imagination into highly personal visions. Nature always played an essential part. Youthful memories of the sea were embodied in his frequent image of a lone boat sailing the moonlit waters. But his major conceptions were more than simple nature poems; their central motif was the human being in relation to superhuman powers. Ryder's art was fundamentally religious; he was one of the few artists of his time to whom religion was not mere conformity but intense, profound belief.
Ryder's art was never bound by the literal naturalism of his time. For him painting was not mere representation but creation in the language of color, form, and rhythmic movement. As he said, "What avails a storm cloud accurate in form and color if the storm is not therein?" He used the elements of nature far more freely than any American contemporary painter, shaping them to his creative sense of design.
Ryder worked long over his pictures, building them in layer on layer of pigment, often keeping them for years, so that his total production numbers only about 165 paintings. Unfortunately he had no sound technical knowledge, and many of his pictures have deteriorated to some extent. Because of the small number of his works and their increasing value, forgeries began to appear in his last years; and after his death the production increased until there are now about five times as many fakes as genuine works.
As a person, Ryder was completely unworldly. He cared nothing for money or reputation. As he said, "The artist needs but a roof, a crust of bread and his easel, and all the rest God gives him in abundance. He must live to paint and not paint to live." He never married, and in later life he became a recluse except to a few old friends. He was utterly unable to cope with housekeeping, and the two rooms in which he lived were in a condition of incredible disorder, piled waist-high with all kinds of objects. After a serious illness in 1915, he lived with friends in Elmhurst, Long Island, where he died on March 28, 1917.
Though Ryder's art had little to do with the prevailing trends of his day, it had much to do with future trends. His freedom from literal naturalism, his relation to the subconscious mind, and the purity of his plastic creation were prophetic of much in modern art.
Further Reading
Three monographs on Ryder have appeared. Frederic Fairchild Sherman, Albert Pinkham Ryder (1920), is a sympathetic study, now outdated by recent research, especially as regards forgeries. Frederic Newlin Price, Ryder (1932), is unreliable, a considerable proportion of the works listed and illustrated being forgeries. Lloyd Goodrich, Albert P. Ryder (1959), gives the most complete biographical and critical account to date; all 81 works illustrated and referred to are unquestionably genuine.
Columbia Encyclopedia:
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Albert Pinkham Ryder
Ryder, Albert Pinkham, 1847-1917, American painter, b. New Bedford, Mass. In 1867 his family moved to New York City. There he studied with W. E. Marshall, the engraver, and at the National Academy of Design, but he was largely self-taught. Except for several brief trips abroad, most of his life was spent in New York. He devoted all his energy to his paintings, on which he worked over and over, often for years. He experimented constantly with the oil medium, loading his canvases with layers of paint, often not allowing surfaces time to dry. Unfortunately, many of his experiments were unsuccessful, and his paintings have deteriorated markedly. Ryder produced only about 160 canvases, now considered among the finest American works of art. Although small in size, they have grandeur of design and feeling, great luminosity, and subtle color. Moonlight and the sea predominate in Ryder's highly imaginative paintings, which are remarkable in their power to evoke a lonely and poetic mood. His later works appear to be painted dreams. All his life Ryder was afflicted with an eye malady that made focusing on small details or looking at bright light painful. Freeing himself, therefore, from the literal depiction of the natural world, Ryder expressed the mysterious forces of nature in rhythmic and somber masses. His tendency toward abstraction has linked him with the modern movement. Notable examples of his art are in most of the important American galleries; the Brooklyn and Metropolitan museums, New York City, and the National and Phillips Memorial galleries, Washington, D.C., have the largest collections. Toilers of the Sea (Metropolitan Mus.), Death on a Pale Horse (Cleveland Mus.), and The Flying Dutchman (National Gall. of Art, Washington, D.C.) are much loved and characteristic works. In American painting Ryder's works were among those most often forged.
Bibliography
See catalog by Whitney Museum (1947).
Wikipedia on Answers.com:
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Albert Pinkham Ryder
| Albert Pinkham Ryder | |
|---|---|
 Ryder in 1905 |
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| Born | March 19, 1847 New Bedford, Massachusetts |
| Died | March 28, 1917 (aged 70) New York City |
| Nationality | American |
| Field | Painting |
| Training | National Academy of Design |
| Movement | Tonalism |
| Influenced by | William E. Marshall |
| Influenced | Marsden Hartley, American Modernist painters |
Albert Pinkham Ryder (March 19, 1847 – March 28, 1917) was an American painter best known for his poetic and moody allegorical works and seascapes, as well as his eccentric personality. While his art shared an emphasis on subtle variations of color with tonalist works of the time, it was unique for accentuating form in a way that some art historians regard as modernist.
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Early life
Ryder was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts.[1] New Bedford, a bustling whaling port during the 19th century, had an intimate connection with the sea that probably supplied artistic inspiration for Ryder later in life. He was as the youngest of four sons; little else is known of his childhood. He began to paint landscapes while in New Bedford.[1] The Ryder family moved to New York City in 1867 or 1868 to join Ryder's elder brother, who had opened a successful restaurant. His brother also managed The Hotel Albert, which became a Greenwich Village landmark. Ryder took his meals at the hotel for many years, but the hotel was named for the original owner, Albert Rosenbaum, not the painter.[2]
Training and early career
The early view of Ryder was that he was a recluse, holding that he developed his style in isolation and without influence from contemporary American or European art, but this view has been contradicted by later scholarship that has revealed his many associations and exposures to other artists.[1] Ryder's first training in art was with the painter William Edgar Marshall in New York.[1] From 1870 to 1873, and again from 1874 to 1875, Ryder studied art at the National Academy of Design.[1] He exhibited his first painting there in 1873 and met artist Julian Alden Weir, who became his lifelong friend. In 1877, Ryder made the first of four trips to Europe throughout his life, where his studying of the paintings of the French Barbizon school and the Dutch Hague School would have a significant impact on his work.[1] Also in 1877, he became a founding member of the Society of American Artists.[1] The Society was a loosely-organized group whose work did not conform to the academic standards of the day, and its members included Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Robert Swain Gifford (also from New Bedford), Ryder's friend Julian Alden Weir, John LaFarge, and Alexander Helwig Wyant. Ryder exhibited with this group from 1878 to 1887. His early paintings of the 1870s were often tonalist landscapes, sometimes including cattle, trees and small buildings.
Artistic maturity
The 1880s and 1890s are thought of as Ryder's most creative and artistically mature period. During the 1880s, Ryder exhibited frequently and his work was well received by critics.[1] His art became more poetic and imaginative, and Ryder wrote poetry to accompany many of his works. His paintings sometimes depicted scenes from literature, opera, and religion. Ryder's signature style is characterized by broad, sometimes ill-defined shapes or stylized figures situated in a dream-like land or seascape. His scenes are often illuminated by dim sunlight or glowing moonlight cast through eerie clouds. The shift in Ryder's art from pastoral landscapes to more mystical, enigmatic subjects is believed to have been influenced by Robert Loftin Newman, with whom Ryder shared a studio.[1]
Later years
After 1900, around the time of his father's death, Ryder's creativity fell dramatically. For the rest of his life he spent his artistic energy on occasionally re-working existing paintings, some of which lay scattered about his New York apartment. Visitors to Ryder's home were struck by his slovenly habits—he never cleaned, and his floor was covered with trash, plates with old food, and a thick layer of dust, and he would have to clear space for visitors to stand or sit. He was shy and did not seek the company of others, but received company courteously and enjoyed telling stories or talking about his art. He gained a reputation as a loner, but he maintained social contacts, enjoyed writing letters, and continued to travel on occasion to visit friends.
While Ryder's creativity fell after the turn of the century, his fame grew. Important collectors of American art sought Ryder paintings for their holdings and often lent choice examples for national art exhibitions, as Ryder himself had lost interest in actively exhibiting his work. In 1913, ten of his paintings were shown together in the historic Armory Show, an honor reflecting the admiration felt towards Ryder by modernist artists of the time who saw his work as a harbinger of American modernist art.[1]
By 1915 Ryder's health deteriorated, and he died on March 28, 1917, at the home of a friend who was caring for him. A memorial exhibition of his work was held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1918. While the works of many of Ryder's contemporaries were partly or mostly forgotten through much of the 20th century, Ryder's artistic reputation has remained largely intact owing to his unique and forward-looking style. Ryder was—along with Thomas Hart Benton, David Siqueiros and Pablo Picasso—an important influence on Jackson Pollock's paintings.[3]
Work and legacy
Ryder completed fewer than two hundred paintings, nearly all of which were created before 1900.[1] He rarely signed and never dated his paintings.[1]
Ryder used his materials liberally and without care. His paintings, which he often worked on for ten years or more, were built up of layers of paint and varnish applied on top of each other. He would often paint into wet varnish, or apply a layer of fast-drying paint over a layer of slow-drying paint. The result is that paintings by Ryder remain unstable and become much darker over time; they crack readily, do not fully dry even after decades, and sometimes completely disintegrate. Because of this, and because some Ryder paintings were completed or reworked by others after his death, many Ryder paintings appear very different today than they did when first created. Many of his paintings suffered damage even during Ryder's lifetime, and he tried to restore them in his later years.[1]
Forgeries
In their book, Albert Pinkham Ryder: Painter of Dreams, William Innes Homer and Lloyd Goodrich wrote, "There are more fake Ryders than there are forgeries of any other American artist except his contemporary Ralph Blakelock." The authors, experts on Ryder, estimate the number of forged works at over one thousand. They also claim (as of 1989) that some remain in private and museum collections in addition to being offered through art dealers and auction houses. Part of the reason why so many fake Ryders exist is that his style is easily copied. Forgers can go to great lengths to fabricate the age of a painting, including painting it on antique canvas and baking it to add cracks. Forgeries can be discovered through visual and chemical examination, and through a provable provenance—a collection of written documentation detailing a painting's ownership history.
See also
Selected works
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The Spirit of Autumn (c. 1875), the earliest documented work by Ryder. Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio.
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The Lover's Boat c. 1890
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The Forest of Arden (1888 - 1897, possibly reworked 1908). Oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.
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The Flying Dutchman, c. 1896
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The Dead Bird, 1890-1900, the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
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Seacoast in Moonlight, 1890, the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
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References
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Roberts, Norma J., ed. (1988), The American Collections, Columbus Museum of Art, p. 20, ISBN 0-8109-1811-0.
- ^ http://www.thehotelalbert.com/history/albert_pinkham_ryder.html
- ^ Jackson Pollock:an American saga, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Published by Clarkson N. Potter, Inc. copyright 1989, PP. 250-251, 254, ISBN 0-517-56084-4
Further reading
- Stula, Nancy with Nancy Noble. American Artists Abroad and their Inspiration, New London: Lyman Allyn Art Museum, 2004, 64 pages [1]
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