X-rays of this unfinished work by Albert Pinkham Ryder provide clues to the artist's process.
Click on the image to see a larger version, so you can follow the analysis below.
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Look beneath the Surface
X-rays of this unfinished work by Albert Pinkham Ryder provide clues to the artist's process.
Click on the image to see a larger version, so you can follow the analysis below.
To begin a painting Ryder attacked the canvas with an energy and freedom that can scarcely be imagined from the refined, "enameled" surface of the completed works. The unfinished canvas Harvest shows broad slabs of color swiftly laid down with the palette knife, very similar to Ryder's description of his early experience painting in nature: "Taking my palette knife, I laid on blue, green, white and brown in great sweeping strokes." Impulsive scribbling with the brush fills the sky; unresolved forms (proto-trees?) shoot upward in a dramatic gestural rush.
Working out his composition directly on the canvas without benefit of studies, Ryder decided to reverse the direction of his haycart and switch from dray horses to oxen. Without scraping or sanding the surface, he brushed rough cartwheels over the earlier design and reddish brown transparent glazes where the oxen were to be, heading left in the opposite direction from the horse, whose blocked-in form appears behind the wheels.
Harvest gives the impression of having been painted at a single go, seized in a moment of inspiration, then altered as the conception changed.
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, Harvest, n.d., oil, 26 x 35 3/4 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of John Gellatly.