LANDSCAPE PAINTING IN THE EIGHTIES In the late nineteenth century artistic ties between the United States and Europe became closer. Increasing numbers of young1 American artists went to study abroad, with Paris now the centre. Landscape painting in this period was still dominated by the] Hudson River School generation. But already a new type of j landscape was taking shape in the work of George Inness, Homer: Martin, and Alexander Wyant. With them, landscape became more concerned with personal emotions than with external facts,] The influence of the Barbizon school contributed to the growth in the artistic sense.
George Inness (1825—1894} began to paint in the Hudson River tradition. After several trips to Europe, Inness became an] admirer of the Barbizon School, particularly of Corot. Under j this new influence he began to paint in a more loose style. Dry] definite outlines disappeared, muted by a veiled softness of colour! and dreaminess of mood. As he developed his style he concentrated’ on expressing subjective emotion and on capturing nature’s evanescent moods, it became more and more tonal and chromatic; •• there came an awareness of the subtleties of changing light’ and atmosphere.
(…) Breaking with the pictorial conventions of the Hudson River School was the solitary genius George Inness, probably the most accomplished landscape painter in the nineteenth-century America. Traveling to France early in his career, he was influenced by the Barbizon School of landscape painting and! incorporated the looseness of their technique and their unified approach into his own work. His Delaware Water Gap, of 1861 has none of the blasted trees, contemplative figures staring off into] a contrived vista, or finicky detail of Hudson River School paintings. Instead, through loosely painted patches, Inness caught the verdant richness, the pulsating fecundity of the earth. And the glow of a rainbow trailing off into the clouds could only have been painted as well at the time by Church. As Inness progressed, he became more withdrawn (he had always had a strong mystical bent), and his paintings grew more subjective. In his landscapes he] sought to record not so much the appearance of nature as its poetry. In such of his late works as Home of the Heron, of 1893, detail is loosened and the dim objects seem bathed in fog. At]
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lirst glance these works seem close to Impressionism, but it is not optical phenomena that Inness is recording. A closer inspection reveals that what he has tried to capture on canvas is the stillness and sense of mystery that nature evoked in him. In his late works, Inness’s closest affinity is to such visionary American painters as Albert Pinkham Ryder.
(Abraham A. Davidson. The Story oj American Painting)

Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens
Ryder hurried home after a performance of Wagner’s Gotter-damtnerung to start this picture at once. So he reported the story to a friend; and he worked without sleep or food for forty-eight hours trying to express the emotional inspiration of the opera. The painting shows the armoured Siegfried riding down a moonlit path, while the Rhine maidens beckon from the Phosphorescent river, begging the hero for his magic ring.
The contrast of the romanticism of this work with the reality of Homer and Eakins is striking, for Ryder’s attitude toward both ‘ife and art was mystical. He has transformed his canvas into a dream world of dark, rhythmical shapes silhouetted against the eerie light in the sky. Wind torments the heavy clouds and gnarled trees and seems a harbinger of impending doom. The swirling, irregular patterns of the trees are repeated by the undulating figures of the Rhine maidens, and even the horse ar|d rider are absorbed into the eccentric design. The dark, monochromatic pigment with which the canvas is loaded heightens! the ominous mood, and the brush strokes themselves follow a sinuous, excited movement.
(Margaret Bouton. American Painting in the National Gallery of Art)

Ryder’s art began to develop its full imaginative range when he was in his thirties. Up to then it had been chiefly landscapes and idyllic scenes, small in scale and relatively naturalistic in style. In the early 1880s commenced the series of poetic, legendary] and religious paintings which were his greatest achievements — Pegasus, Toilers of the Sea, Jonah, The Flying Dutchman. The Story of the Cross, Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens, Constance, The Tempest, The Race Track, Macbeth and the Witches, The Forest of Arden, Under a Cloud. (…)
In this new phase his subjects were drawn partly from memories of the sea and the country, as in his earlier work, but more from literature and legend — the Bible, and the great poetry of the English-speaking world — the ballads, Chaucer, Shakespeare (his greatest admiration), and the nineteenth-century romantics, Cole-1 ridge, Byron, Campbell, Moore, Poe, Tennyson. Wagner’s operas] inspired two of his greatest works, Siegfried and The Fttfinq Dutchman. But his paintings were never merely “literary”. They were not literal illustrations, but imaginative dramas inspired by great themes. Often the subject was only the starting-poinw for pictorial invention, as in The Temple of the Mind, where the horror of Poe’s Haunted Palace was translated into serene moonlitl melancholy,
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The world of nature always played an essential part. The blasted heath in Macbeth, the wildly tossing trees in Siegfried, the turmoil of the waves in Jonah and The Flying Dutchman, the unearthly beauty of the landscape in The Forest of Arden, the infinitely lonely sea and sky in Constance — in all these nature was not a mere background but a principal actor, as expressive of emotion as the human actors. To Ryder nature was a presence, a living embodiment of man’s subjective self, of his ecstasies and fears, of the drama of his inner life. The sea, which had played such a part in Ryder’s early years, haunted him ail his life—its vastness and loneliness, the rhythmic flow of its waters, the majesty of its storms, its profound peace. His frequent image of a lone boat sailing moonlit seas might be a symbol of man’s lonely journey through infinity and eternity. In these little marines is concentrated the essence of the sea as it lives in the mind of man.
In some aspects Ryder was a tragic artist: Siegfried, Macbeth, The Flying Dutchman and The Race Track were all tragic subjects, filled with a sense of dread and doom. But his art had no bitter pessimism, no violence of fantasy, no love of the macabre. It revealed a sense of the grandeur of tragedy that was in its way Shakespearean. Ryder’s mind, as with most American romantics, was idealistic, with a fundamental innocence. He was not sophisticated enough to be morbid. (…) His most pessimistic* picture — most “morbid” if you will — as well as one of the most compelling, was The Race Track, an allegory of death based on the suicide of a friend who had lost his life’s savings-
on a horse race.
(Lloyd Goodrich. Albert - Pinkham Ryder}

ALBERT P1NKHAM RYDER
(1847—1917) Albert Pinkham Ryder was the third of the important painters
o remained in America instead of going abroad and whose ctivities were closely connected with America. In contrast to Homer and Eakin^ Kyder represented a romantic strain in American art. His art was the product of an intense inner life, little influenced from without by either the world around him or bw the art of others. He found inspiration for the subjects and moods of his works in the great romantic literature of the world, especially in Shakespeare, and in the changing phases of the sea.
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The romantic tradition in American art is an old one. In the late eighteenth century West and Copley (…) had anticipated the French romantic movement in their, subject-matter if not in their style. (…) Their successors Allston, Vanderlyn, Morse and Rembrandt Peale had continued these noble essays in the Grand Style. In a more native vein the Hudson River School had celebrated the romantic beauties of the American continent in huge canvases that were at once panoramic and meticulous. Their subject-matter and viewpoint were romantic, but their style remained literal and naturalistic, especially when contrasted with their contemporaries, the French romantics and the Barbizon painters.
In the 1860s and 1870s the Hudson River form of romanticism began to give way to the more intimate and introspective art of Hunt, Inness, Martin, Fuller, Newman, Blakelock and Ryderi Instead of naturalistic representation of romantic subjects! these younger men expressed personal emotion in the language of colour, tone and design. Subjective romanticism replaced literal romanticism. Of all this generation of subjective romantics! the purest and most original was Ryder.