Albert Pinkham Ryder — Artworks

Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847–1917) was an American painter, born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, known for moody, poetic seascapes and allegories. He studied at the National Academy of Design in New York between 1870 and 1875 and was a co-founder of the Society of American Artists in 1877. He made four trips to Europe. His small paintings are usually tonalist in effect, with simplified forms and a glowing, layered surface, and they draw on literature, the Bible and Wagner's operas. Among them are The Lover's Boat (c. 1881), Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens (1888–91), Jonah, Constance, The Forest of Arden, The Flying Dutchman (c. 1896) and The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse). He worked on a canvas for years, and he completed fewer than two hundred paintings, nearly all before 1900. Ten of them were shown at the Armory Show in 1913, and some historians see him as a forerunner of modernism. A memorial exhibition was held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1918, a year after his death in New York.