Landscape

Albert Pinkham Ryder

1897–98 (?) · Oil on canvas · The American Wing

This landscape is surprisingly modern in its simplified details, flattened forms, and patterned composition. A shepherd and animals of the sort that had appeared in Ryder’s earlier, Barbizon influenced paintings are here overwhelmed by the setting’s stylized elements: a stream rushing along a rigid diagonal, sinuous hills filling the middle ground, and clouds rising in contrasting bands and culminating in undulating deep-blue shapes outlined in light. Works such as this one prompted the avant-garde painter Marsden Hartley, born thirty years after Ryder, to call him a “master of the arabesque.”

Artist

Albert Pinkham Ryder

Date

1897–98 (?)

Medium

Oil on canvas

Culture

American

Department

The American Wing

Credit line

Gift of Frederick Kuhne, 1952