BETSY BROUN: Of all my personal favorites, the paintings of Albert Pinkham Ryder are first. Ryder used to have a huge cult following that began around the turn of the twentieth century and died out in the 1960s and 70s. But even today, painters often regard him as a symbol of the artist’s devotion to his work. Collectors and scholars are inclined to leave Ryder alone because they know there are at least ten forgeries for every original painting. Even the original paintings are often in poor condition and almost impossible to conserve. There’s now a growing skepticism about Ryder’s myth, so people are less inclined to revere him for his eccentricities. They’re more inclined to consider him a doddering old man who fussed endlessly over his pictures without much result.
Looking at a wonderful painting like “The Flying Dutchman,” it’s hard to deny that he was a great master with a gift that was different from every other artist in the nineteenth century. Ryder wanted to achieve a new kind of color and translucency in his paint, as if it were glowing from within. He tried different ways to do this – for instance, painting on top of gold leaf. But mostly, he mixed large quantities of oil in his paints, and then layered one color on top of another, in order to get what he hoped would be depth and brilliance of color. Often, the paint film was so thick it couldn’t dry, and instead it would crack and shrivel over time, leaving the paintings in ruins. In any case, Ryder’s color experiments are almost impossible to record in printed illustrations. I suspect they don’t look perfect on your monitor either.
The story of “The Flying Dutchman” is very ancient and has many variations. It tells how a Dutch ship captain swore on the True Cross that he could sail around the Cape of Good Hope against adverse winds. God cursed him for his blasphemy by the halt of time. He could never reach port until his son should bring him a fragment of the True Cross for him to kiss. Here, Ryder shows the son with outstretched arms, hailing his father’s phantom ship. He has grown old himself without yet releasing his father from the curse.
Most of Ryder’s great literary subjects concern defiance and redemption. The greatest by far is “Jonah”, an Old Testament story that is an allegory for death and resurrection. When God ordered Jonah to go to Nineveh, he tried to escape his fate by setting sail for Tarshish. God responded by sending a great wind to overwhelm the ship, but Jonah’s shipmates, sensing disaster, threw him overboard so they could save themselves. Ryder shows the dramatic moment when a great fish bears down on the hapless Jonah. For Ryder, salvation only begins when you recognize that your fate is in God’s hands.
There are so many similarities between these two great Ryder masterworks, “The Flying Dutchman” and “Jonah”. In both, the surging seas evoke a mood of high drama, creating rhythms within the composition. Ryder loved the clockwise swirl of waves and sky. This is one of Ryder’s earliest attempts to build that kind of rhythm. It’s much more delicate and gentle, but still we feel how the motion rocks the boat and sails, pivoting and rotating them within the frame, with the moon as an anchor for the composition. This painting, by the way, is called “With Sloping Mast and Dipping Prow”. The subject is taken from Coleridge’s poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. You’ll not be surprised to learn that it, too, is about salvation through forgiveness.
In “Jonah”, Ryder martials all his rhythmic forces. The churning seas have the familiar clockwise motion, but they are interrupted by a violent, diagonal zig-zag effect, as if the picture might rupture down the middle. Compounding the sense of turmoil is the very high horizon line, so the ocean swells almost fill the frame. There’s no release in the sky either, where God’s all-embracing wings double as clouds pressing down on the horizon. All nature seems to share Jonah’s sense of panic.
Changing his mind was Ryder’s curse, from which he found no salvation. The paint film on “Jonah” is so thick that it still is slightly tacky to the touch, even after a century, so we keep it framed under glass. He worked on the picture for years and years. As he changed his ideas, he just kept painting over what was underneath. It’s interesting to see what lies beneath the surface. A technique called autoradiography lets us see the organic elements in the picture. Here, in this autoradiograph of “Jonah”, we see Ryder’s expressionistic brushwork with broad, slashing strokes. He was hailed as a precursor of modernism because he was just as concerned with the process and the materials of painting as he was with rendering an image. This is one reason Jackson Pollock thought Ryder was so great.
Sometimes when you look below the surface, you find a surprise. Look closely at this autoradiograph of “Jonah”, just in the left area near the hull of the boat. If you put the left edge of the painting at the top, you can see there’s a woman staring at us. If you don’t see it at first, look closer. It’s fainter than the dark lines of Ryder’s painting. Interestingly, Ryder painted his greatest masterwork on a canvas that already had a portrait on it. I could go on and on with surprises and discoveries about Ryder. He’s inexhaustible. I guess that’s one reason he remains my favorite.
