Albert Pinkham Ryder found himself as an artist as the result of a debilitating illness. What makes this story even more dramatic than it might appear is that Ryder's illness concerned his sight! An infection followed a boyhood vaccination, and Ryder's sight was permanently damaged. Bright lights bothered him, and small detail was lost to his perception. Naturally this affected his schooling, and he was fortunate to graduate from grammar school.

One day his father gave young Ryder a set of paints to cheer his spirits. "When my father placed the box of colors and brushes in my hands," Ryder wrote, "and I stood before my easel with its square of stretched canvas, I realized that I had in my possession the wherewith to create a masterpiece that would live throughout the coming ages. The great masters had no more!"

Almost immediately, Ryder was attracted to attempt landscapes. At first, this yielded only dismal results. Ryder notes, "In my desire to be accurate I became lost in the maze of detail. Try as I would, my colors were not those of nature. My leaves were infinitely below the standard of a leaf."

Then something happened that ignited the fire of Ryder's expression. He had a kind of epiphany that changed his manner of perception and his painting. He was studying a familiar bit of scenery that we believe he had attempted on several occasions, when, "the old scene presented itself…and before my eyes framed in an opening between two trees. It stood out like a painted canvas…three solid masses of form a color: sky, foliage, and earth. The whole was bathed in an atmosphere of golden luminosity. I threw my brushes aside; they were too small for the work at hand. I squeezed out big chunks of pure, moist color, and taking my palette knife, I laid on blue, green, white, and brown in great sweeping strokes. As I worked, I saw that it was good and clean and strong. I saw nature springing into life upon my dead canvas! Exultantly I painted until the sun sank below the horizon. Then I raced around the fields like a colt let loose and literally bellowed for joy!"

Grazing Horse by Albert Pinkham Ryder, c. 1880
In the Brooklyn Museum Collection

Technically, Ryder was not a perfectionist painter. As Elliot describes it, "he only wrestled the medium into obedience." He was famous for using whatever was at hand to create his works: alcohol, candle wax, varnish, and oil. He painted and repainted works, often painting on top of works from the day before, while they were still in state of drying. As a result, his entire production, some 150 canvases, are yellowed and cracked, or blackened beyond recognition. Were not for the few color reproductions that were made, later generations might wonder at the ruins of his work, puzzling over the admiration they had evoked.

One of the more famous Ryder anecdotes is of a painter friend who had praised one of his works. Ryder offered the canvas to him, and the next day the friend dropped by the studio to pick it up. Ryder took up the canvas and washed it in a filthy basin of water and dried it with an equally dirty towel. Having done this, he stood gazing at the picture with a faraway look in his eyes. It seemed that he had forgotten the presence of his friend. Eventually he turned, and with the simplicity of a child, said kindly and regretfully, "Would you mind coming again next year and I think you can have it then, if I find that I can do what more it needs. I have only worked on it a little more than ten years now."

More than pictures, Ryder seemed to be obsessed with the experience of painting. He perhaps kept his works year after year, not so much to perfect them, but to have the most complete experience with them. He wrote this very telling remark in letter to another painter friend: "Have you ever seen an inchworm crawl up a leaf of twig, and then, clinging to the very end, revolve for a moment in the air, feeling for something to reach something? That's like me. I am trying to find something out there beyond the place on which I have a footing."

It will remain his legacy that Ryder's genius was for putting on canvas what humans feel about such things as moonlight and storm winds, for his ability to give these things recognizable form. Alexander Elliot adds this summarization of Ryder's art: "It is not the shock of recognition that his paintings evoke, but the feeling little children have of being lost and found again in a strange, God-filled world."

These sentiments will always provoke comparisons, in my mind, of Ryder's gift and that of Rickie Lee Jones. Her direct, and often impatient approach to the task of recording, the boldness of her vocals, the sensation that she has magically created a masterpiece before your eyes, all remind me of Ryder's canvases.

R. L. Pennyhead