Ryder, Albert Pinkham (1847–1917)
US painter. He was one of the most original US artists of the 19th century. His romantic landscapes, moonlit seascapes, and depictions of scenes from Shakespeare and Wagner are intense, poetic, and dreamlike. His best-known work, Death on a Pale Horse (c. 1910; Cleveland Museum of Art), has an eerie, haunted quality.
| Born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, he studied briefly at the National Academy of Design but was largely self-taught as an artist. He visited Europe, but was unimpressed by its art, and steadfastly pursued his own highly original vision. He lived the life of a recluse in a New York apartment, very slowly painting and repainting his small pictures, the forms simplified, the golden-yellow colours, set off by sombre surroundings, giving the works a spectral luminosity. |
| Sea paintings such as Flying Dutchman and Jonah and the Whale have caused him to be compared with his contemporary Herman Melville, the author of Moby-Dick. |
