The Essex Canal
Albert Pinkham Ryder (American, 1847–1917)
c. 1896
- Medium
- Oil on canvas mounted on board
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- 41.3 × 52.1 cm (16 1/4 × 20 1/2 in.)
- Culture
- United States
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Arts of the Americas
- Credit line
- Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Geist
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Little Ones profiles and older: it shows gentle subjects for the very young. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
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 and focused on the arduous process of painting itself as instrumental to one’s creative vision. Ryder’s reclusiveness only added to his intrigue and mythic status as an artist ahead of his time.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
