Title: Night Landscape
Medium: Oil On Board
Size: 7 x 9 inches
Frame: 14 x 16 inches
Age: Antique
Condition: Great Overall

Signature: Signed lower right

Artist: Ralph Albert Blakelock (1847 - 1919)

Ralph Albert Blakelock (1847 - 1919) was active/lived in New York, California. Ralph Blakelock is known for Luminous landscape and portrait painting.

Ralph Blakelock, the son of a New York City doctor, entered the Free Academy of the City of New York in 1864, turning to music and fine arts after one year. He left college in 1866 to paint landscapes, considering himself to have been self-taught. By 1867 he was exhibiting realistic paintings in the National Academy, resulting from his Eastern travels, and by 1869 he declined European studies to travel West. There is no exact record of Blakelock's movements, but he actually lived among the Indians, working his way to California and through Mexico to Panama and the West Indies. In the West from 1869 to at least 1872, he made hundreds of sketches.

He returned to New York City about 1876. His painting style had evolved to the Impressionist, so radically different from his contemporaries that he could not sell his work at all. One group of 33 paintings was bought by a New York City dealer from the artist for $100. Blakelock lived in absolute poverty with his wife and nine children, peddling his paintings from door to door, generally without success. Throughout his ordeal, Blakelock maintained his style of pure romanticism, studying crack in the walls as designs, resorting to music to capture a painting mood.

In 1899, he succumbed to the constant economic strain, became violent, and was removed to an asylum near Middletown, New York, where he painted paper landscapes that simulated money in his delusion of immense wealth. After Blakelock was unable to paint seriously, his romantic work came into vogue, and by 1916 the Toledo Art Museum paid $20,000 at auction for his Brook by Midnight, a painting that Blakelock had sold for less than the cost of the auction catalog. This acceptance did not benefit the artist in the asylum or his family who had all lived in a one-room shack at the bottom of a Catskill ravine. When Blakelock's oldest daughter, Marian, discovered she could paint as her father had, she sold similar paintings to a dealer who changed her signature to her father's, driving her into an asylum in 1915.

The Blakelock story may be the bitterest tragedy in American art, while his major paintings may be the purest, the image of an Indian encampment beneath silhouetted trees before the blue-white moon.


Great for collection or home decoration.

Provenance:
Collection from Estate in New Jersey


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