A romantic visionary painter, Albert Pinkham Ryder now is considered one of the most important American artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His haunting moonlit seascapes and evocations of passages from the bible, great poetry and even Wagnerian operas - all were steeped in his deep reverence for nature.
Going beyond his individual paintings, however, what is significant about Ryder is the way in which his simplified rhythmic forms foreshadowed much of what was to come in modern art. To him, painting was not simply a representation of what was seen, but rather a manifestation of an inner vision. It was a creative language which spoke to the senses through color, form and tone.
New Bedford, Massachusetts, where Ryder was born in 1847, was the center of the whaling industry; his forebears had been mariners for many generations. An infection damaged his eyes when he was a boy, cutting short his education. Some speculate that Ryder's predilection for eerie moonlight and vague forms, rather than detail, may have stemmed from his sight problem.
His father bought him paints and canvas to occupy his time and, coached by a local amateur painter, the boy went into the fields to try his hand at painting. Around 1867, Ryder and his family moved to New York City. The first time he applied for admission to the National Academy of Design school he was turned down, and instead studied with portrait painter William Edgar Marshall, whose naive approach to religious and romantic subjects influenced him deeply. In 1871 the Academy relented and accepted Ryder.
In 1877 and again in 1882, Ryder went to Europe, but was impressed neither by the contemporary paintings he saw nor by the old masters in the museums. He went to Europe on two other occasions, but each time it was more for rest and to study the effect of moonlight on water than from any other desire to study European art. In the 1880s he began his work based on biblical and poetic episodes, manifesting his deeply religious inner vision.
In his last years, Ryder became more and more reclusive and eccentric. After a serious illness in 1915, kindly friends took him into their Long Island home and cared for him until his death in 1917.
His work is represented in the collections of the
Art Institute of Chicago, the
Brooklyn Museum, the
Cleveland Museum of Art, the
Detroit Institute of Arts, the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, the
Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the
National Gallery in Washington, D.C. and the
National Museum of American Art,, Washington, D.C.
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