Albert Pinkham Ryder

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(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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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.

Albert Pinkham Ryder
Ryder in 1905
Born	March 19, 1847(1847-03-19) 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.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Training and early career 3 Artistic maturity 4 Ryder's methods 5 Eccentricity and fame: Ryder's later years 6 The question of authenticity 7 See also 8 Selected works 9 Further Reading 10 References

Early life

Ryder was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts as the youngest of four sons. 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. Little is known of his childhood. 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 opened The Hotel Albert in 1902, which became a Greenwich Village landmark. It was named for Ryder, and was where he lived and painted for many years.

Training and early career

Ryder's early interest in art was nurtured in New York by the painter William E. Marshall. From 1870 to 1873, and again from 1874 to 1875, Ryder studied art at the National Academy of Design. He exhibited his first painting there in 1873 and met artist Julian Alden Weir, who became his lifelong friend. By 1878 Ryder had joined the newly-formed Society of American Artists, a loosely-organized group whose work did not conform to the academic standards of the day. 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

Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens (1888 - 1891), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

The 1880s and 1890s are thought of as Ryder's most creative and artistically mature period. 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. Ryder rarely signed his works.

Ryder's methods

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.

Eccentricity and fame: Ryder's later years

The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse) (1895 - 1910), Cleveland Museum of Art

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.

By 1915 Ryder's health deteriorated, and he died 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.^[1]

The question of authenticity

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

• Tonalism
• Society of American Artists
• Western painting
• History of painting

Selected works

The Forest of Arden (1888 - 1897, possibly reworked 1908). Oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.

The Flying Dutchman, c. 1896

The Dead Bird, 1890-1900, the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

Seacoast in Moonlight, 1890, the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

Further Reading

• Stula, Nancy with Nancy Noble. American Artists Abroad and their Inspiration, New London: Lyman Allyn Art Museum, 2004, 64 pages [1]

References

1. ^ 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

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