Word: ryders
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Such were the romantic subjects chosen by Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847-1917), the most eccentric, least prolific, most technically inept but arguably the most interesting U.S. painter of his time. While most of his contemporaries carried on with grandiose elaborations of the Hudson River School, Ryder strove to distill the simple and essential. Later, while the impressionists were turning everybody's eyes toward the light, Ryder studied structure. Later still, when other U.S. painters were studying ashcans and backyard realism, he stubbornly continued to dream of symbols and eternal truths...
Reveries by Night. There has been one big problem in appreciating Ryder's work: he painted with an utter disregard for basic technique. He piled paint layer upon layer, to thicknesses of a quarter of an inch, often returning to work on a canvas while it was still wet. He found it almost impossible to think of a painting as finished, frequently took back ones he had sold and com pletely reworked them. He called the process "ripening" and likened himself to an inchworm reaching out tentatively into space from the end of a leaf. "I am trying...
Born in New Bedford when it was still a whaling port, he was the youngest of four sons of a fuel dealer. The family moved to New York when he was about 23, and an older brother turned restaurateur helped send him through art school. Ryder lived in Greenwich Village and later in a West Side rooming house, where he slept huddled beneath piles of worn-out overcoats on a floor that was heaped to a height of two feet with yellowing newspapers, empty cans, cheese rinds and mice months dead in the traps he had set for them. Troubled...
...Ryder produced only some 160 paintings, left most of them unfinished and parted with few. Strangely enough, the world's largest collection of completed Ryders was stashed away for years (from 1929) in the storerooms and corridors of Washington's Smithsonian Institution. Seventeen of the 18 were the gift of a New Yorker named John Gellatly, an eccentric who had the wit to marry money and the eye to pick Ryder as the American painter who could hold his own with the Europeans. In a final exuberance, Gellatly gave his whole $5,000,000 collection to the Smithsonian...
Neil Coles, a top-ranking British golf pro, took a slow boat to Houston last year for the Ryder Cup matches rather than fly, thereby eliminating himself from several tournaments that took place while he was at sea, including the one with the richest first prize of all, the $55,000 Alcan. Singer Jack Landron passed up a free junket to Finland, which he won on TV's Dating Game, because he refused to fly. While designing the capital city of Brasilia, Architect Oscar Niemeyer regularly drove the 575 miles overland from Rio de Janeiro rather than take...