The Great Romantic

A frail, solitary boat pitches and tosses in an angry, moonlit sea. An apocalyptic horseman gallops around a desolate racecourse, scythe at the ready. Christ, risen from the grave, appears to Mary Magdalene in a somber garden, Macbeth conspires with the witches on a wind-blasted heath, and Siegfried happens across the Rhine maidens bathing seductively in a river bordered by strangely twisted trees.

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 to find something out there beyond the place on which I have a foot ing," he said. The result was that each canvas, with its endless layers of paint drying at different rates, was sure to crack and darken with age.

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 with weak eyesight since childhood (and later by gout, malnutrition and kidney disease as well), he stayed indoors during the day, roamed the streets of Manhattan by night, dressed in tatters, often pausing in a reverie to stare at the moon for minutes at a time.

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, leaving himself and his second wife with only a $3,000-a-year annuity. When he died, she sued--but the museum kept the paintings.

In the years that followed, the Ryders moldered in the Smithsonian's cramped spaces. At last, when Congress approved a new gallery for the National Collection of Fine Arts in 1958, the Smithsonian could look forward to having a proper showcase for its Ryders. It commissioned Art Restorers Sheldon and Caroline Keck to rehabilitate Ryder's ravaged oils.

The Kecks stripped off the canvas backing. On the hot table, they flattened ripples and smoothed out cracks, working the paint back together and touching it up where necessary with judicious "inpainting." At least once, the Kecks had to scoop out from the back of a picture underpaint that had never dried and was still gooey.

Now on proud display in the N.C.F.A.'s new gallery, the paintings are suffused with something approximating their original unearthly aura, a weird kind of radiant half-light that Ryder thought of as "golden luminosity." It floods across the two foreground figures in Christ Appearing to Mary, painted about 1885. It pulses in the background of The Flying Dutchman, which shows the phantom ship gliding across the horizon behind an open boat manned by three storm-tossed mariners. As Ryder remarked: "What avails a storm cloud accurate in form and color if the storm is not therein?" In this painting, the storm is undeniably there.

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