American Art Collaborative

"I have been working to get my paint less painty looking than any man who went before me . . ." Ryder, Wood diary no. 6, August 1896, Wood Papers, Huntington Library, quoted in Broun, Albert Pinkham Ryder, 198
Albert Pinkham Ryder painted with a "wet-on-wet" technique, by adding new layers of thick paint and varnish before the previous ones had a chance to dry. This overloaded the work to such an extent that one visitor described his work as a "boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly," and some paintings are still soft a hundred years later. At one point, In the Stable was covered with a network of cracks known as alligatoring, the worst of which have since been filled by a conservator. The white horse in the image was modeled after Ryder’s horse Charley, which he owned as a child in New Bedford, Massachusetts. (Broun, Albert Pinkham Ryder, 1989)