The Essex Canal

c. 1896

Albert Pinkham Ryder
American, 1847–1917

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.

Status: On View, Gallery 177
Department: Arts of the Americas

Artist: Albert Pinkham Ryder
Title: The Essex Canal
Place: United States (Artist's nationality:)
Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.: c. 1896
Medium: Oil on canvas mounted on board
Dimensions: 41.3 × 52.1 cm (16 1/4 × 20 1/2 in.)
Credit Line: Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Geist
Reference Number: 1980.279
IIIF Manifest The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) represents a set of open standards that enables rich access to digital media from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions around the world. Learn more.: https://api.artic.edu/api/v1/artworks/60239/manifest.json

New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Loan Exhibition of the Works of Albert P. Ryder, Mar. 11–Apr. 14, 1918, cat. 5, as The Canal.
New York, Anderson Galleries, Nineteenth Century Paintings, 1937, cat. 19 (ill.).
New York, Parke–Bernet Galleries, American Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture, 1967, cat. 70 (ill.).

John Gellatly, New York, by 1918. Charles Melville Dewey, by 1932; Anderson Galleries, American Art Association sale (Dewey estate); April 8, 1937; Ferargil Galleries, New York, 1937. Jesse Sobol, New York, 1951. Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, sale, November 15, 1967; Herbert Geist, Chicago, 1967; given by him to the Art Institute of Chicago, 1980.

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Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

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IIIF Manifest The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) represents a set of open standards that enables rich access to digital media from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions around the world.

Learn more.