As the leading representative of visionary painting in America, Albert Pinkham Ryder, born on this day in 1847, has been valued both as a deeply personal voice and a precursor of expressionist and abstract art.
A Visionary Master
As the leading representative of visionary painting in America, Albert Pinkham Ryder, born on this day in 1847, has been valued both as a deeply personal voice and a precursor of expressionist and abstract art.
When my father placed a box of colors and brushes in my hands, 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 through 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
Source: Quote from: "Paragraphs from the Studio of a Recluse," Broadway Magazine, Sept. 1905. Quoted in: 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), Moonlight,1887, oil on mahogany panel, cradled, 15 7/8 x 17 3/4 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of William T. Evans.