Ralph Albert Blakelock

Ralph Albert Blakelock
Ralph Blakelock, 1870
Born	October 15, 1847(1847-10-15)
Died	August 9, 1919 (aged 71)
Nationality	American
Field	Painting, Landscape art
Training	Largely self taught

Ralph Albert Blakelock (October 15, 1847 – August 9, 1919) was a romanticist painter from the United States.

Biography

Ralph Blakelock was born in New York City on October 15, 1847. In 1864, Blakelock entered the Free Academy of the City of New York (now known as the City College) with aspirations of becoming a physician. After his third term he opted to dismiss his formal education and left college. From 1869-71 he traveled west, extensively wandering far from known civilization and spending time among the American Indians. Largely self-taught as an artist, he began producing competent landscapes, depicting select views from his travels, as well as scenes of American Indian life. His works were exhibited in the National Academy of Design.

Moonlight, 1885, the Brooklyn Museum

In 1877 Blakelock married Cora Rebecca Bailey; they had nine children. In art, Blakelock was a genius, yet, in business dealings and in monetary transactions he proved a failure. He found it difficult, if not crushing to maintain and support his wife and children. In desperation he found himself selling his paintings for extremely low prices, far beneath their known worth. In hopes of lifting his family from abject poverty, reportedly on the day his 9th child was born, Blakelock had offered a painting to a collector for $1000. The collector made a counter offer and after refusing the proposed sum Blakelock found himself in a bitter argument with his wife. After the domestic dispute, Blakelock returned to the patron and sold the painting for a much lesser sum. Defeated and frustrated, it is said he broke down and tore the cash into pieces. And so it was after such repeated failed business transactions that he began to suffer from extreme depression and eventually show symptoms of mental frailty. In 1899 he suffered a breakdown.

Without the extensive medical knowledge available today, Blakelock was diagnosed with a mental disease, now thought to have been schizophrenia, and he was committed to a sanatorium. His depression manifested in schizophrenic delusions in which he believed himself immensely wealthy - perhaps a compensation for his long struggle to provide for his family.

Almost as soon as Blakelock went into the first psychiatric hospital, his works began to receive recognition. Within a few years the paintings he had once sold for next to nothing were resold for several thousand dollars. Meanwhile, Blakelock languished in the Middletown State Insane Asylum, whose administration and staff were unaware of his fame as an artist, and who viewed his belief that his paintings were in major museums as one more sign of his illness. While confined he continued to paint in ink, painting on the backs of cardboard and various supports, substituting bark and his own hair for brushes.^[1]

About four years before Blakelock's death, Harrison Smith, then a young reporter with the New York Tribune, was informed of Blakelock's whereabouts and went to see Blakelock in the asylum. He found him largely lucid, although under the delusion that an imagined "diamond of the Emperor of Brazil" had been stolen from him. Smith explained to the asylum director who Blakelock was, and managed to arrange to bring Blakelock and the director to Manhattan, where a major gallery retrospective of Blakelock's work was taking place. Blakelock was awed by the changes in the city in the two decades since he had last seen it, and thrilled to see the recognition his work had received. Smith scored himself a major news story. (In a 1945 account, Smith added that Blakelock had quietly informed him that several of the paintings were forgeries, but Smith chose not to put that in his story because of the question of how far he could rely on the word of the less than fully sane Blakelock.) These events led to Blakelock's release from the asylum. He lived out his last years in the Adirondacks, with the woman who had brought the story to Smith as his legal guardian.^[1]

He continued painting until his death at the age of 71 on August 9, 1919.

The paintings

Blakelock's early landscapes have their genesis in the style of the Hudson River school of painters. In time, he developed a more subjective and intimate style. His favorite themes were those depicting the wilderness and solitude; evocative and emotional paintings of illuminated moments in nature, of moonlit landscapes and twilight hours and Indian camps in the solitude of nature. At first blush Blakelock's style is reminiscent of the French Barbizon School, yet, his technique was highly personal and through his individualistic style his paintings summoned the viewer into a luminous, almost other wordly realm. In the majority of his paintings, space is given depth by the use of light; moonlight most often. Along with his contemporary Albert Pinkham Ryder, Ralph Albert Blakelock was one of the most individual American painters of his time.

One of his many paintings entitled Moonlight was sold at the highest price ever paid for the work of a living American artist at that time. Sadly, his rise in public notoriety along with the increase in his art sales never benefited his family or himself. By 1903 his works were being forged, so much so, that he remains today as "perhaps the most forged" artist in America. Such was the final ironic touch to one of the most tragic stories in American art.

Trivia

Blakelock is a key figure in the setting of Paul Auster's well-known novel Moon Palace.

Notes

Sources

• Glyn Vincent: The Unknown Night: the madness and genius of R.A. Blakelock, an American painter, Grove Press 2002, ISBN 0-080211734-1.
• Norman Geske: Ralph Albert Blakelock: The Great Mad Genius, Questroyal Fine Art, Inc. 2005.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Ralph Albert Blakelock

• Artcyclopedia
• Figge Art Museum
• Review of biography by Davison
• Phillips Collection
• Nebraska Blakelock Inventory