Albert Pinkham Ryder
The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse) (1895–1910)
Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847–1917) was born in the whaling port of New Bedford. He is known for moody, atmospheric paintings that sit somewhere between landscape and vision. His work has had an influence on western figurative painters to this day. Mostly I think Ryder became a symbolic representative of a painter who allowed future generations of artists to more deeply investigate expressive mood, compression, and an almost claustrophobic sense of space.
By the 1870s, Ryder was successful enough to support himself, primarily through small, tonal landscapes. Looking at works like The Lone Scout, depicting an isolated figure glowing against a darkened field. I can’t help but think of Odd Nerdrum and his staged, luminous figures set in emptied landscapes. There’s no documented connection.
In the mid-1880s, Ryder appears to have shared a studio with Robert Loftin Newman. Documentation is thin, but the timing aligns with a noticeable shift in Ryder’s work.
Newman’s surviving work is scarce, but what remains shows a similar interest in nocturnal atmosphere and poetic subject matter in the piece ‘Boating at Night’ below. (There are almost zero Newman paintings left).
I am drawn to Ryders handling of materials. Tubed pre-mixed paint was a new thing in France during the 1880s. For most of Ryders lifetime, artists still commonly prepared their own pigments and mediums. Ryder pushed this far beyond convention. He was less concerned with durability than with achieving a particular internal luminosity.
To frame the issue from contemporary perspective, artists use two primary mediums while painting (Acrylic and Oil).
Acrylic (not available during Ryders lifetime): This paint is pigment suspended in a plastic binder.
Dries & cures quickly and allows immediate layering.
It’s okay to paint oil on acrylic.
Its okay to mix other media that doesn’t require a drying period into the acrylic paint.
Oil: This paint is pigment mixed into a drying oil (typically linseed).
The paint is slow to oxidize, requiring considered layering (“fat over lean”) to avoid cracking. Best practice is to allow each layer of paint to dry to the touch before painting on top. It can take a year or more to fully cure.
Painting acrylic on oil is literally an exercise in futility, the acrylic will slop off of the oil in a relatively short period of time and is a good exercise to show the benefits of being aware of archival practices.
Ryders methodology: Hodgepodge of experiments.
Ryder reportedly mixed pigments with varnishes, resins, and oils in unstable combinations, sometimes reworking surfaces long after they had partially set. The result were paintings that materially achieved a unique depth and glow he was after, but at the cost of structural integrity.
There are accounts of his paintings remaining tacky decades after completion. Today, many have darkened significantly, with surfaces that have cracked, sagged, or even partially disintegrated.
de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Anselm Kiefer all, in different ways, pushed materials beyond archival limits.
There are stories of DeKooning mixing mayonnaise and other mediums into his pigments to get the viscosity he was after. Ryder was more experimental than that.
Rothko applied his paint in washes of very thin paint. Because of the thinned nature of each layer, the binder/linseed oil is not strong enough to bind the pigment to the canvas and over time it falls off. There are stories of how a Rothko painting will over time acquire a pile of pigment dust below the painting.
In Kiefer’s case, deterioration is often embedded in the meaning of the painting. Part of the painting experience is the expectation that it will fall apart.
The irony is that the very instability of his surfaces contributes to the feeling of the work. The darkness, the sinking tones, the slow collapse, it all reinforces the mood he was chasing in the first place.
Lorelei 1896-1917
There is speculation that Ryder painted this as a reflection on how he thought of romance. Women as evil seductresses who lured sailors to their deaths. Sounds about right to me. Ryder re-worked this painting over 20 years.
Jonah 1885-1895
Ryder worked on this larger work for a decade. I love this piece. It reminds me of the best of Turner and evokes the chaos of god testing Jonah. (Was Ryder aware of Turner?)
Artists influenced by Ryder: More coming. I want to include a slew of contemporary artists where I really see a lot of Ryders sensibilities.
The Cliffs 1921
Thomas Benton was reportedly deeply influenced by Ryder’s painting philosophy which I think of as being the willingness to have a narrative imagined story. I think you can see some of that here.