Albert Pinkham Ryder
Having painted a series of dark landscapes inspired by the work of Albert Pinkham Ryder in 1909, Hartley returned to his American artistic hero late in his career. This highly imaginative portrait of Ryder is Hartley’s posthumous tribute to the painter, whose isolated, melancholy existence and financial poverty struck a sympathetic chord in him. In the portrait, Ryder appears frontal and isolated, like a saint or an icon. Hartley also composed a poem and several essays about the artist, including one in which he describes Ryder’s eyebrows as "lichens overhanging rocks of granite."
Artwork Details
- Title: Albert Pinkham Ryder
- Artist: Marsden Hartley (American, Lewiston, Maine 1877–1943 Ellsworth, Maine)
- Date: 1938
- Medium: Oil on commercially prepared paperboard (academy board)
- Dimensions: 28 × 22 in. (71.1 × 55.9 cm)
- Classification: Paintings
- Credit Line: Edith and Milton Lowenthal Collection, Bequest of Edith Abrahamson Lowenthal, 1991
- Object Number: 1992.24.4
- Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art
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