Word: ryders
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...part, these limits were due to the poverty of Ryder's training as a draftsman of the human figure. Ryder could make dramatic, even magical conjunctions of shape. His color, judging from what is left of it, was rich. But he drew feebly. New York in the early 1870s could not give an art student much more than a remote echo of beaux arts disciplines in that department. The convention is to treat this as Ryder's good luck: it enabled his native, visionary qualities to prosper, unsullied by academic convention...
...truth is that his figures and animals never benefited from their awkwardness. His horses are spindly, half-seen nags, and the dryads, babies and damsels in his decorative paintings are boneless stereotypes. Ryder's attempts at decoration -- mirror frames, screens and so forth -- look naive and gaumless compared with the more polished work of Tiffany or John La Farge. Ryder was not sophisticated enough to rival them, while as a Realist he was stumped by a lack of curiosity about the actual, resistant world. You know at once that Ryder spent no time looking at a body and analyzing...
Does his inadequacy with the figure matter? Yes, but not fatally. Turner himself -- whose Slave Ship, often seen in New York in the 1870s, is probably the main source for Ryder's perennially astonishing vision of Jonah in the churning waters, about to be swallowed by the whale -- also drew figures like slugs. Still, when you look at the figures in Ryder's The Story of the Cross, whose "awkward posture and flattened quality" the catalog rather optimistically likens to Duccio and Cimabue, you know that any such comparison is impertinent. The Ryder is pious kitsch...
Landscape Ryder could handle -- though not for reasons Turner would have approved. It made fewer demands on particularity. "There was no detail to vex the eye," Ryder wrote of one view of a lone tree in a field near Yarmouth, Mass. And so "I squeezed out big chunks of pure, moist color and taking my palette knife, I laid on blue, green, white and brown in great sweeping strokes . . . I saw that it was good and clean and strong. I saw nature springing into life upon my dead canvas. It was better than nature . . . I raced around the fields like...
...Thus Ryder the proto-Expressionist was born. He sounds like De Kooning, but actually he looked more like his idol, Corot, only denser and more fixed: tiny imploded scenes, whose glow and atmospheric subtlety were much admired in their time but can hardly even be assessed now. For in pursuit of jewel-like effects and deep layering of color, Ryder painted "lean over fat," so that slower-drying strata of paint underneath pulled the quicker-drying surface apart. He would slosh abominable messes of varnish on the surface, and pile up the pigment by incessant retouching until the images became...