Landscape

Dateca. 1870

Mediumoil on canvas

Dimensions9 1/4 × 12 3/4 in. (23.5 × 32.4 cm)

Donor credit lineODHS Purchase with funds from the Rose Lamb Gifford Fund

Object number2005.3

Institutional Credit LineCourtesy of the New Bedford Whaling Museum

DescriptionThis small tonalist landscape by Albert Pinkham Ryder shows a stream or inlet running from foreground to background and disappearing around a bend. The marshy landscape is composed of small shrubs and bushes in oranges, dark browns and deep greens. One larger shrub is to the right of the water. The sky is pale blue with partial cloud cover, and is reflected in the water.

As Noam Gonnen explains, Ryder was, like many of his colleagues, experimenting extensively with open-air painting, particularly in the beginning of his career. His renowned tendency of simplified compositions with clearly articulated masses can be traced in his open-air works ... Ryder regarded the practice of open-air painting as much more than a conventional source for landscape imagery. In an account published in Broadway magazine in 1905, “Paragraphs from the Studio of a Recluse,” Ryder described the enlightening experience that had seized him one day as he was painting outdoors. In Ryder’s first-person account, the relationship between the open-air experience and freedom from conventions is salient, while his narration of the event imbues it with a sense of ecstatic revelation: Nature is a teacher who never deceives. When I grew weary with the futile struggle to imitate the canvases of the past, I went out into the fields, determined to serve nature as faithfully as I had served art. In my desire to be accurate I became lost in a maze of detail […]. The old scene presented itself one day before my eyes framed in an opening between two trees. It stood out like a painted canvas — […] Three solid masses of form and color — sky, foliage and earth — the whole bathed in an atmosphere of golden luminosity. I threw my brushes aside; they were too small for the work in 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. It was better than nature, for it was vibrating with the thrill of a new creation. 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." The direct, elementary—even primordial—essence of nature, consisting of “three solid masses of form and color,” might be identified in many of Ryder’s landscapes. One of them is the early painting entitled Landscape, now in the New Bedford Whaling Museum. In his colorful literary account, Ryder is drawing a sharp distinction between the self-referential, academic method of “imitating the canvases of the past” and being a “student of nature.” In doing so, he first and foremost juxtaposes culture against nature. When he tries to copy nature using the same strategy that he employed while trying to imitate works by the Old Masters, he reaches a dead end. Only when he throws his brushes aside, giving up on “culture” and affords himself a new open-minded approach to the art of representation, does he attain something “better than nature”: an independent creation that is more valuable than a mere copy of the natural world, and wherein he sees “nature springing into life upon [his] dead canvas.” This event seems to stage the precise moment at which Ryder’s work is transformed from a representation into the thing itself: nature becomes art and art becomes nature.Label TextThis early landscape is revolutionary in the way it almost dissolves into abstraction, with large areas of light and shadow balancing the composition of trees bordering a canal. The canvas may have been unprimed, allowing the weave to be visible in areas where thinned paint stains the fabric rather than resting on the surface. Glossy glazes add highlights in some areas. From the beginning, Ryder departed from conventional techniques to explore new ways of using pigments and media, saying he wanted to get his paint “less painty looking.” The first recorded owner of this painting was C.E.S. Wood of Portland, Oregon, who would become the artist’s most sympathetic and inspired supporter.Exhibition History"A Wild Note of Longing: Albert Pinkham Ryder and a Century of American Art," (NBWM, June 24 - October 31, 2021)
"The Art of Albert Pinkham Ryder" (Washington, D.C., National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Brooklyn, New York, The Brooklyn Museum of Art; London, England, Whitechapel Art Gallery, April 1990-March 1991, no. 27, fig. 23, pp. 32, 33, 178, illustrated p. 242)
"American Paintings, Watercolors, and Drawings from the Collection of Rita and Daniel Fraad" (Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, May-July 1985, no. 7, pp. 14-15, illustrated)
"American Painting: Selections from the Collection of Daniel and Rita Fraad" (The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York; Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, June-November 1964, no. 12, p. 20, illustrated)
"Representative Nineteenth-Century American Paintings and Decorative Arts" (San Diego Museum of Fine Arts, San Diego, California, January-February 1952)
(possibly) Babcock Galleries, New York, Selected Intimate Paintings by American Artists, December 1946, no. 1.Published ReferencesFrederic Fairchild Sherman, Albert P. Ryder, New York, 1920, no. 122, p. 73
Frederic Newlin Price, Ryder, New York, 1932, no. 76

William Agee, Elizabeth Broun et al., A Wild Note of Longing: Albert Pinkham Ryder and a Century of American Art, Rizzoli/New Bedford Whaling Museum, 2021. ProvenanceColonel Charles Erskin Scott Wood, Portland, Oregon and Los Gatos, California (possibly purchased from the artist); Mrs. C. Kirkham Smith (his daughter), San Rafael, California; Maynard Walker Galleries, New York; Babcock Galleries, New York; Acquired from the above, 1955; sold at Sotheby's, New York, NY, US, December 01, 2004; to Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, LLC; ODHS purchase, 2005

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