me bodily shape
seeking a solitude of its own. I recall no other landscapes impressed
with a more terrific austerity save Greco's incredible "Toledo," to my
thinking a finality in landscape creation.

There is quietude, solace, if you will, in Michel, in Courbet, but
there is never a rest for the eye or the mind or the spirit in those
most awesome of pictures which Ryder has presented to us, few as they
are; for the Ryder legend is akin to the legend of Giorgione. There is
always splendor in them but it is the splendor of the dream given over
to a genius more powerful than the vision which has conjured them
forth. It is distinctly a land of Luthany in which they have their
being; he has inscribed for us that utter homelessness of the spirit
in the far tracts that exist in the realm of the imagination; there is
suffering in his pictures, that fainting of the spirit, that
breathlessness which overtakes the soul in search of the consummation
of beauty.

Ryder is akin to Coleridge, too, for there is a direct visional
analogy between "The Flying Dutchman" and the excessively pictorial
stanzas of "The Ancient Mariner." Ryder has typified himself in this
excellent portrayal of sea disaster, this profound spectacle of the
soul's despair in conflict with wind and wave. Could any picture
contain more of that remoteness of the world of our real heart as
well as our real eye, the artist's eye which visits that world in no
official sense but only as a guest or a courtly spectator? No artist,
I ought to say, was ever more master of his ideas and less master of
the medium of painting than Ryder; there is in some of his finest
canvases a most pitiable display of ignorance which will undoubtedly
shorten their life by many years.

I still retain the vivid impression that afflicted me when I saw my
first Ryder, a marine of rarest grandeur and sublimity, incredibly
small in size, incredibly large in its emotion--just a sky and a
single vessel in sail across a conquering sea. Ryder is, I think, the
special messenger of the sea's beauty, the confidant of its majesties,
its hauteurs, its supremacies; for he was born within range of the sea
and all its legends have hovered with him continually. Since that time
I have seen a number of other pictures either in the artist's
possession or elsewhere: "Death on the Racetrack," "Pegasus," canvases
from The Tempest and Macbeth in that strange little world of chaos
that was his home, his hermitage,