Our Featured Painting:
A Stag and Two Does, A Stag Drinking
by Albert Pinkham Ryder
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A Stag and Two Does, ca. early 1880s
Oil on gilded leather on canvas, mounted on board
27 x 19 inches

A Stag Drinking, ca. early 1880s
Oil on gilded leather on canvas, mounted on board
27 x 19-1/8 inches

During the late nineteenth century, many American artists were experimenting with the direct painting strategies of Impressionism, while others remained devoted to the tenets of academic Realism. However, this was not the case with Albert Pinkham Ryder. Indeed, Ryder was a romantic visionary painter––a individualist who used literal fact as a starting point for his highly subjective depictions of nature, ranging from evocative moonlit marines to equally introspective landscapes and genre scenes inspired by sources ranging from the Bible to William Shakespeare and Edgar Allan Poe. Executed in a non-traditional style characterized by dark, rich colors, simplified forms, strong designs and thick glazes, his paintings were acquired by discerning collectors such as Thomas B. Clarke and admired by artists as diverse as J. Alden Weir, Kenneth Hayes Miller and Marsden Hartley. He also attracted praise from the critics of his day, among them Charles de Kay, Clarence Cook and Samuel Isham, the latter declaring: “Ryder constructs a world of his own, mysterious and often illogical, with all the vividness and incoherence of a dream.”

Ryder’s oeuvre includes a number of decorative screens painted on leather, among them the tripartite Children Frightened by a Rabbit, Woman with a Deer, Children Playing with a Rabbit, in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. His work in this vein also includes A Stag Drinking and A Stag and Two Does, outdoor nature scenes which originally formed part of a three-panel screen. In all likelihood, these vignettes were done in the early 1880s for Cottier & Co., a well-known London decorating firm with a branch in New York. To be sure, the proprietor, Daniel Cottier, was both a friend and mentor to Ryder, introducing him to patrons and collectors and arranging his initial two trips to Europe. An ambitious man who combined his interest in fine craftsmanship and furniture design with a perceptive business sense, Cottier commissioned Ryder to create a number of artistic decorations––paintings on gilded leather for folding screens and smaller works that were inserted in custom-designed furniture, as well as mirror frames–– to accompany the designs made by his craftsmen; in so doing, he played a vital role in promoting Ryder’s involvement with the interior-decorative movement that emerged in the United States during the 1870s. The influence of Cottier goes even further: in the two pieces under discussion, Ryder’s use of the “deer in a forest” theme may have been influenced by similar motifs found on oriental scrolls and porcelains in Cottier’s shop. At the same time, his preference for an unconventional support––leather with gold underpaint––suggests his familiarity with the experiments of John La Farge, the painter and stained-glass designer who exhibited a selection of decorative panels, one of them with a gold underlayer, at Cottier’s in 1875.

The influence of the fluid painting style of Barbizon School painters such Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, an artist Ryder deeply admired, is apparent in his painterly handling, wherein shapes are interpreted as broad, sketchy masses, devoid of crisp contours and specifics (a reflection of Ryder’s belief that “the artist should fear to become the slave of detail. He should strive to express his thought and not the surface of it”). Certainly, his summary method imbues the scene with a dreamy, ethereal quality that is enhanced by the rust and earth colors of his palette––hues that enhance the bucolic atmosphere and work with the gilded leather surface to produce a warm, golden luminosity.

A Stag Drinking and A Stag and Two Does underscore Ryder’s desire to evoke the essence, or underlying spirit, of nature through fluent brushwork and a limited chromaticism. Notable for its intimate rustic subject and idyllic mood, these exceptional panels also represent Ryder’s link with the American decorative movement of the 1870s and 1880s––an era when many of our finest painters were given the opportunity to apply their artistic vision to functional objects intended for the upper-class home. In Ryder’s case, his decorative work was vital to his artistic evolution, providing him with the opportunity to experiment with new media and supports and to broaden his aesthetic approach as he moved away from conventional landscape painting to an art based on imagination and inner feeling.

CL

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