Artist Quotation
"When my father placed a box of colors and brushes in my hands, and I stood before the 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. I at once proceeded to study the works of the great to discover how best to achieve immortality with a square of canvas and a box of colors." —Albert Pinkham Ryder, "Paragraphs from the Story of a Recluse," Broadway Magazine, 1905.
Ryder, born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1847, is heralded as one of America's greatest visionary painters. Though he attended classes the National Academy of Design in New York, he learned primarily through informal instruction and experimentation.
In the 1880s Ryder turned from pastoral landscapes toward subjects with dark literary, biblical, and Wagnerian themes. He utilized a complex technique of underpainting, overpainting, scumbling, and glazing to make the surface of his canvas look like Old Master paintings he had seen in Europe. Jonah, begun in the mid 1880s, was then Ryder's largest and most ambitious work. It's dramatic subject, drawn from the Old Testament, and vigorously painted surface exemplify this eccentric artist's visionary work, full of mystery and symbolism.
Source: Elizabeth Broun. Albert Pinkham Ryder (Washington, D.C. and London: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1989).
Pictured: Albert Pinkham Ryder, 1847–1917, Jonah, about 1885–1895, oil on canvas mounted on fiberboard, 27 1/4 x 34 3/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of John Gellatly.
"When my father placed a box of colors and brushes in my hands, and I stood before the 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. I at once proceeded to study the works of the great to discover how best to achieve immortality with a square of canvas and a box of colors." —Albert Pinkham Ryder, "Paragraphs from the Story of a Recluse," Broadway Magazine, 1905.