Chauncy Foster Ryder SOLD

Curator's Comments:

While pure impressionism persisted into the early postwar period, new directions (but still non-abstract) had been declared as early as the Thirties by Lester Stevens, and Chauncey Foster Ryder (1868-1949). Stevens (and Coppedge in Bucks County) used fauvism as a theme to create a  muscular but childlike American post-impressionist style. Ryder favored a personalized Orientalist technique that became all his own and is well recognized, not only for its soft wash, but for his grey-green pallet, which gave rise eventually to the term Ryder Green. One viewer whom we showed his Old Mill painting to complained that the roof line sagged. Of course anyone who knows New England's 18th-century structures would recognize that the weight of the central chimney and its hearths created a dip in the roof line as the building settled on its none-too-strong foundation. But that is not the point. What Ryder was doing was transforming his mill, perhaps Swains Mill as he called it in a watercolor sketch, into a pagoda with upturned roof! We have provided a view of Japan's Golden Pagoda to emphasize just this point. And don't miss the bands of color in the stream with their subtle but exact mirroring. Ryder believed that his beloved New England (primarily the Wilton, New Hampshire area) possessed a natural ecology most akin to Asian understanding as in the works of his favorite Hokusai.

Ryder studied at the Art Institute of Chicago (1891);  Smith's Art Academy; and later at the Academie Julian, Paris with Jean Paul Laurens (1901). He was an Academician (1920) of the National Academy and was an active member of the Salmagundi Club; National Arts Club and the American Water Color Society. He maintained studios in both New York and New Haven, along with his residence in Wilton, and he was associated with the painting community at Old Lyme. Ryder and his bride of 1891, Mary Dole Keith, also painted in France up to the first war, along with close friend the American painter Max Bohm, who had also worked under Laurens. It's no wonder that Ryder is represented by three works in the Smithsonian. He is also represented in the permanent collections of over 50 museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Art Institute of Chicago; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art; Baltimore Museum of Art; Corcoran Gallery of Art; National Portrait Gallery; National Academy of Design; Carnegie Art Institute; and the Museum of Modern Art. He won gold medals at the National Academy, American Water Color Society, the National Arts Club; the New York Water Color Society, and many more.  We are very proud to offer what we think is one of his best works.