Ralph Albert Blakelock (1847-1919)
The son of a New York doctor, Blakelock attended the Free Academy of New York where he studied music and fine art. He left after only one year to paint landscapes and traveled west, sketching various themes throughout Mexico, Panama, and eventually the West Indies. There are no clear records of Blakelock’s life or travels, but he returned to New York around 1876. Having adopted the radically new Impressionist style, Blakelock was so far ahead of public taste that he was unable to sell any of his work. He, his wife, and their nine children lived in abject poverty as he desperately tried to make a living selling his art. He was eventually committed to a mental institution after a long decline into mental illness and delusion. It was not until his downward spiral that Blakelock garnered recognition for his extraordinary paintings. By 1913, he had become one of the most famous artists in America. That same year one of his works sold for $13,900, which was the most ever paid for a living artist’s work in America at the time.
Information courtesy of Heritage Auction Galleries, January, 2009.
As a visionary painter, Ralph Albert Blakelock was self taught and developed his own technique. He was champaioned in his own time as a truly American painter with a distinctive style of built up layers of thick paint, scraped away and added to, to create a richly-textured surface. His name was often linked with Albert Pinkham Ryder, another artist of the imagination. Blakelock, however, became financially destitute because he was largely ignored by the critical press. He suffered a breakdown in 1899, and ironically, by the end of his life, his work was demanding as much as $20,000 while he spent the remainder of his life in a sanitorium in the Adirondacks.
The poetic and intensely personal paintings of Blacklock influenced a young generation of landscape artists coming into maturity in the early decades of the 20th century. Painters such as Marsden Hartley and Arthur B. Dove adapted his uniquely American romantic vision to the modern forms and color that they were experimenting with from European modernists.