A Riveting Ryder Show at the New Bedford Whaling Museum

Soulful seascapes and eerie moonscapes from one of America’s seminal painters

A Wild Note of Longing is the new survey exhibition at the New Bedford Whaling Museum on Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847–1917). Ryder, who grew up in New Bedford, is an unheralded lodestar in American art. His work was the centerpiece of the Armory Show in 1913, with ten of his enigmatic paintings in the central gallery and much fuss made over the recluse as he approached the end of his life. The Armory Show introduced America’s culture sophisticates to European avant-garde art, which gave them a jolt. An American avant-garde already existed, nascent in some ways but developed in others. The Armory Show displayed America’s best stab at a truly modern spirit through artists such as Ryder.

Ryder’s work is recognizable. With Sloping Mast and Dipping Prow, from 1880 to 1885, is one of his seascapes. A single ship, indistinct sailors, a simmering sea, and moonlight make for a scene that verges on a fevered dream. His paint surface is gnarly, as if made from thick wool. His skies are infinite but streaky, active and insistent rather than soothing. His format is on the small side. His art’s a weird, spooky thing, and riveting.

I think it’s fair to introduce him, as this invaluable show does, as “the last Romantic and the first Modernist,” at least among Americans. His paintings, and there’s not many of them, are dreamy and opaque. They exist in the soul. That’s Ryder’s Romanticism, and it makes him old-fashioned. His use of materials and his technique are experimental, verging on bizarre. For young artists wanting a new look, he proved it could be had.

This one-stop-only exhibition isn’t big, but it’s both attractive and illuminating. The museum itself is dedicated to America’s whaling industry, with cotton the country’s most lucrative antebellum business, and the history of New Bedford, once one of the richest cities in the world. I’ve never been in a place that does history, adventure, industry, and reinvention better.

Ryder, his parents, and two of his three brothers moved from New Bedford to New York in 1867 to join his eldest brother, who ran a big hotel in Greenwich Village. There Ryder stayed, with a few trips to Europe and one to Tangiers. He was very close to his parents and brothers and had no romantic attachments. He lived alone in cultivated squalor in Greenwich Village until he died, always able to support himself as an artist, well known and respected, but a renowned oddball.

The exhibition and the catalogue are straight with their host museum. New Bedford surely informed Ryder’s interest in the sea, a big topic for him, and New Bedford was an arts-savvy place. The iceberg painter William Bradford and Albert Bierstadt, both art celebrities, lived there.

New Bedford didn’t create Ryder the artist, however. He dabbled in painting there and wasn’t among rubes. In New York, he took art classes at the National Academy of Design, befriended artists such as J. Alden Weir, made the newly formed Metropolitan Museum of Art his mecca, and, in the 1870s, became a serious artist himself.

Ryder’s earliest paintings are both different from the crowd and definitely his.

He lived in New York but didn’t do cityscapes, and his early pictures weren’t seascapes, either. They’re rural landscapes, such as the New Bedford museum’s Landscape, from around 1870. He painted cows and horses in fields. Perspective and space are distorted. Movement is slow motion. They’re gauzy, meaning unfocused, and painted densely in rich yellows and browns, not monochromatic but close to it.

The handsome and comprehensive catalogue describes Jonah as Ryder’s “unassailable greatest masterpiece,” and I agree. It’s peak Ryder, painted between 1885 and 1895, at 27 by 34 inches one of his biggest pictures, and enough Sturm und Drang to drive Goethe to his fainting couch. Ryder had been gone from New Bedford for 20 years, yet whales still figured in his thinking. Jonah’s story in the Old Testament concerns his defiance of God’s instructions to go to Nineveh and preach about the city’s decadence.

Jonah declines and tries to escape God’s raised eyebrows. Fleeing in a crowded boat, he’s tossed into the sea during a storm. A Big Fish, centuries later called a whale, swallows him. After a time of mortification in its belly and submission to God’s command, Jonah is vomited onto the shore, not far from Nineveh. After, I presume, freshening up, he gives one heck of a sermon in Nineveh, leading the depraved locals to turn from sin.

Jonah depicts the moment the prophet hits the water and sees the fish, eying him greedily and heading his way. Ryder painted The Flying Dutchman and With Sloping Mast and Dipping Prow about the same time, and all are in the show. Sea and sail seem to orbit a rising moon in With Sloping Mast, the water roiled rather than turbulent. Still, nature’s in charge, and that’s the narrative. Yellows and blues dominate. The moon bleaches them but, as objects gain distance, leaves them dark and impenetrable.

Jonah is a religious picture, which doesn’t make it or Ryder unique. Religious art did indeed exist in Protestant America. It hasn’t been deeply researched, and the field is mostly considered in terms of stained glass in churches. Abbott Thayer, Ryder’s contemporary and as mercurial, painted big angels who indeed look as if they come from outer space. They are flat, totemic, and pack a stare that may or may not frighten.

In Jonah, though, Ryder’s not doing church art. He’s indulging his own vision and impulses. I’m not sure I agree with the exhibition’s argument that Ryder felt abandoned in life, as Jonah might have felt when he hit the water. Job was the poster boy for abandonment, not Jonah. Trial, tribulation, and calm after the storm seem to describe Jonah’s trajectory. The Book of Jonah comes late in the Old Testament. It’s the portion of the Old Testament where God doesn’t spare the rod but promises hope and salvation to those with trust and faith.

The Flying Dutchman is another redemption drama, dating from Dutch sea shanties, about a ghost ship that never docks and from which sinners never leave. Here, the waves are angry indeed, but, again, the phantom ship and waves move elliptically around the moon. Another ship tries to catch it. It’s carrying chips from the Cross. Kissing the sacred wood frees captives from the Flying Dutchman’s endless voyage.

These paintings don’t erupt from nowhere, primal and inventive as they are. In the 1880s, Winslow Homer did a series of dramatic rescue pictures, showing women plucked from the sea by burly men. These are more focused, more polished, and they’re high-Victorian storytelling. They feel real, since Homer’s a realist and the best sea painter of his age, but amid all the sea spray are a few drops of schmaltz.

Ryder’s work is unsettling and wild, but he wasn’t always there. He’d painted Lovers’ Boat around 1881. It’s a dark moonscape but it’s calm enough for him to write that its vastness is “grand and lovely.” He’d also painted shepherdesses and dryads. The catalogue suggests they’re charming, but I’d say, “Anything but.” They’re not scary but remote, like Millet’s more abstract gleaners. They’ve got a touch of bacchanal fever. Ryder’s limited palette and fuzzy forms suggest silent movies experienced after long drags of pot.

Moonlight becomes a favorite topic. It makes the seen nebulous and the unseen palpable. In a few short years, his scenes darken and intensify in mood. His moments are dire, with a happy ending seeming impossible. Ryder’s not the painter of American optimism. That “you are there” sensibility and those American tastes for the now, everyday, sunny, or slummy are nowhere to be found.

Even Turner’s late seascapes seem less fraught and less cryptic. Of course, there’s Watson and the Shark, by Copley, but that’s a hundred years earlier, and Rembrandt’s Christ in a Storm on the Sea of Galilee, from 1633. Ryder’s different. The show and catalogue evoke his biography. At this point, Ryder turns solitary, his family dying and his world shrinking to his studio and to his thoughts. His seascapes turn hallucinatory. Homer’s seascapes never go there. Ryder’s other contemporaries — Eakins, Dewing, La Farge, Twachtman, the trompe l’oeil stars Peto and Harnett, Tiffany, and St. Gaudens, among many others — were idiosyncratic and trailblazing but not like this.

Turner is a good analogy on materials. Ryder’s look comes, in big part, from unorthodox materials. Turner got the effects his wanted, usually flashy ones, from mixing his oil paints with whatever did the trick — milk, wax, chalk — and using cheap paint that did the trick but wasn’t durable. Like Ryder, he painted wet on wet but continued to do touch-ups long after a picture left his studio. Applying fresh paint, often with fugitive substances, on dried paint created density and juiced a picture’s look, but it’s a recipe for flaking.

Ryder didn’t always use canvas. He liked dark, oiled cherry-wood surfaces, painted directly on them, and sometimes left passages of the dark wood unpainted and part of the look of the finished work. Sometimes he mixed gold flakes in his paint or painted over thin gold leaf. Ryder often bought pictures back and, especially after 1900, kept working on them. All of these practices make for a big conservation challenge. Ryder’s colors often darken. Mottled, scraped, pocked surfaces, most intentional, have a dense minced-pie look. His paint surfaces crack, too.

Young artists looking at Ryder’s work at the Armory Show didn’t start mixing their paints with, say, bits of coarse crystal. Ryder freed them from convention and the American documentary impulse.

Elizabeth Broun’s essay on Ryder’s soulfulness is important scholarship. “A Wild Note of Longing” is a line in a poem by Ryder called “The Passing Song.” It’s a poem about the loss of a woman because the man who loves her is rudderless and can’t or won’t “shape his course to her and remain by her side.” I’m not a psychiatrist, and Ryder’s dead. Suffice to say his vision is strong, tough, and personal. Broun compares him to Van Gogh, another contemporary. Jonah and Ryder’s late work such as Moonlight Marine, to her, have the same mix of death, transcendence, and resurrection as Van Gogh’s Starry Night, from 1889. It’s a good argument and a springboard to a serious study of American religious painting and the fin de siècle avant-garde.

A word of warning about Ryder. In the 1920s and 1930s, his work was famous. I don’t think there’s an American artist whose work generated so many fakes. His work is calculated awkwardness, with lots of asymmetry and plenty of crags and coves. His palette is not extensive. A fake, put in the oven for 20 minutes, will develop the hallmark cracks. His work isn’t big and, unlike a landscape by Church, doesn’t have a million details. There are far more fake than real Ryders.

The Americans closest to Ryder in style and feeling are Washington Allston (1779–1843) and George Inness (1825–1894). Allston was the subject of my dissertation. I’m the president, treasurer, secretary, resident medium, and, I fear, only living member of Allston’s fan club, so I’m irremediably biased. He was, though, Boston’s most revered artist well into the 1880s, and Ryder is, in style and subject, a New Englander, regardless of how long he lived in Greenwich Village. His small paintings of imaginary women in reverie are ghostly and elusive. Allston’s niche included religious art and tales from the Age of Chivalry. These look prescient when we confront Ryder.

Inness’s landscapes turn hazy and then shadowy but not until the early 1890s and then due to his Swedenborgian religious views. Like Ryder, both painted things that seemed subjective and possessed by an inner spirit.

William Agee’s essay and a chunk of the exhibition look to Ryder’s heirs. Jackson Pollock said Ryder was the only dead American artist worth studying. Cheeky, yes, and grossly false, but telling. Alex Katz, Burchfield, Rothko, Thomas Hart Benton, and Marsden Hartley look at his pulsing, swirling forms, thick paint surfaces, and moodiness as the antidote to Hudson River School topographics, Gilded Age artifice, and art that looks French, which means Picasso and his heirs.

Ryder’s presence at the Armory Show and the Met’s memorial exhibition of his work the year after he died made Ryder America’s most famous art eccentric until Warhol. Toilers of the Sea and Death on a Pale Horse — alas, not in the show owing to the pandemic lockdowns — were as well-known as iconic work by Whistler, Pollock, Homer, and Hopper. Ryder’s an American Old Master now but an aesthetic risk-taker and role model done justice by the Whaling Museum’s superb show.

A few thoughts on the New Bedford Whaling Museum. It’s a scholarly place but thoroughly accessible. For years, whale blubber was among the main ingredients in soap and artificial lighting. Whale bone was the raw material for stays for corsets, a ubiquitous garment that made the hourglass figure possible. For a time, New Bedford was as big a part of the energy business as Houston is today. The museum looks frankly at the industry, mixing whale skeletons and models of whale hearts. A child can walk through a ventricle. In an era of waste not, want not, every part of the whale was industrially used.

A whaling ship fills a space as big as a hangar. It’s the largest enclosed ship in the world. Whaling was an international and multicultural business. It’s an ocean-based business. The sea, vast and wild, is part of New Bedford’s story.

The museum pits navigation and science against the ocean’s intractability in endless ways.

The museum’s interpretation doesn’t judge. Nothing offended me, my ultimate test of a proposition’s accuracy. No portions of the gallery carpet were mildewed from tears extorted by victim ideology. “Ten Things to Be Guilty About” wall panels were nowhere to be found.

Nothing is celebratory, and there’s no gloss. It’s deeply researched history by people trained to present facts unsullied by modern judgments that would astonish the dead by their naïveté, spite, and arrogance. I loved the cases on corset stays, as elaborately ornamented as present-day, erotic lingerie is lacy and flimsy. Undressing a woman must have seemed like breaking into a vault.

Cities are vibrant places. New Bedford remade itself when whaling collapsed. Textiles replaced whale oil. Immigration, banking, transportation, everyday life, and cycles of boom and bust are insightfully explored with artifacts and photographs. The museum isn’t only about New Bedford. This little city is a template, but one with unique twists. New Bedford was a big Quaker city. King Philip’s War, per capita America’s bloodiest, occurred on its doorstep. And whaling wasn’t on the docket in, say, Peoria. This mix of local and national history makes it appealing.