The Essex Canal
c. 1896
Medium
Oil on canvas mounted on board
Dimensions
41.3 × 52.1 cm (16 1/4 × 20 1/2 in.)
Classification
painting
Department
Arts of the Americas
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
60239
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
Albert Pinkham Ryder was one of the most innovative artists of the late 19th century, creating reductive, yet expressive compositions out of thick, slowly worked paint, combined with glazes, varnishes, and unconventional materials. In The Essex Canal, a waterway faintly meanders from the green-hued foreground to a skim of blue along the horizon, with an expansive sky beyond. A younger generation of American artists celebrated Ryder as an important early modernist, who pushed toward abstraction a...
About the Artist
Albert Pinkham Ryder · 1847–1917
Largely self-taught, Albert Pinkham Ryder is widely considered one of America's greatest visionary painters. His intense use of color and mysterious themes are distinctly Romantic. Ryder moved with his family from New Bedford, Massachusetts to New York in 187, where he studied briefly at the New York National Academy of Design. He studied the engravings of Camille Corot and other Barbizon painters...