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| | Albert Pinkham Ryder |
 | | Ryder was an erratic painter, and his reputation rests on perhaps a dozen works, most of which are his famous "marines" - dark, concentrated images of boats, the fishing smacks of his New England youth, pitted against wind and wave under the centered, tide dragging eye of the moon. |
 | | They concentrate the Romantic terrors of seascape; in them Ryder showed that he was the Samuel Palmer of Ishmael's "watery part of the world." Thick darkness and eerie light turn in the sky; the turgid sea heaves, scattered with moon flakes and endowed with a Courbet-like solidity by Ryder's constant overpainting. |
 | | Ryder was the sole painter who, in their view, could make up for the dispiriting absence of a great national school of American art in the early twentieth century. |
| www.artchive.com /artchive/R/ryder.html (955 words) |
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