1938, Marsden Hartley, Albert Pinkham Ryder -- Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York)
From the museum label: Hartley based this portrait of Albert Pinkham Ryder, one of his artistic heroes, on an encounter with the artist in New York decades earlier. Ryder, a generation older than Hartley, had garnered a reputation for being a mystic-like hermit during his lifetime and was revered by younger artists who credited him with developing a distinctly American approach to landscape painting, characterized by a dark, moody palette, abstracted forms, and thick impasto surfaces. Fittingly, Hartley evoked paintings of religious icons in his tender portrait, with the figure of Ryder seeming to glow against a dark background. The portrait speaks to the preoccupation of American artists of the 1930s with those of earlier generations in the pursuit of establishing a native arts tradition.
1938, Marsden Hartley, Albert Pinkham Ryder -- Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York)
From the museum label: Hartley based this portrait of Albert Pinkham Ryder, one of his artistic heroes, on an encounter with the artist in New York decades earlier. Ryder, a generation older than Hartley, had garnered a reputation for being a mystic-like hermit during his lifetime and was revered by younger artists who credited him with developing a distinctly American approach to landscape painting, characterized by a dark, moody palette, abstracted forms, and thick impasto surfaces. Fittingly, Hartley evoked paintings of religious icons in his tender portrait, with the figure of Ryder seeming to glow against a dark background. The portrait speaks to the preoccupation of American artists of the 1930s with those of earlier generations in the pursuit of establishing a native arts tradition.