Another Opening, Another Show!

The Gilded Age: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum opened yesterday at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The Gilded Age is associated with sophistication and elegance, but visionary artist Albert Pinkham Ryder probed beneath the glitter in his provocative and haunting works.

Here Ryder's terrifying vision recounts the Scottish legend of Lord Ullin's daughter. Her small boat trapped amid tumultuous waves, surrounded by steep cliffs and menacing clouds, she and her chieftain lover attempt to flee her wrathful father.

Based on the 1809 poem by Thomas Campbell, the picture brings his words to life in the artist's nightmarish vision of the rough channel far in the Scottish north. Together in a fragile craft under dramatically moonlit heavens, the doomed lovers cling to their last moment together before their boat capsizes.…

In its romantic themes of nature's sublime power and the passion of love and death, Ryder's painting embodies the mystical preoccupations of the end of the century, the spiritual corrective to the extravagant materialism of the Gilded Age.

Source: Elizabeth Prelinger. The Gilded Age: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (New York and Washington, D.C.: Watson-Guptill Publications, in cooperation with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2000).

Pictured: Albert Pinkham Ryder, 1847–1917, Lord Ullin's Daughter, before 1907, oil on canvas mounted on fiberboard, 20 1/2 x 18 3/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of John Gellatly.