Ralph Albert Blakelock

Pool in the Adirondacks, about 1875-1878

oil on canvas

12  x 10 in.

The Ballard Family Memorial Fund

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Ralph Blakelock was born in New York City and attended the College of the City of New York with the intention of becoming a physician, but instead began a brief art education at Cooper Union. Declining his father’s offer to pay for more advanced art training, Blakelock wondered for three years through the America West on horseback spending time with Native Americans.  Without additional formal training, Blakelock painted scenes of Native American life and western landscapes, which were shown at the National Academy of Design. A great artist, but a poor businessman, Blakelock lived with his wife and family of nine children in poverty.  Forced to accept meager sums for his work, Blakelock suffered a breakdown and was committed to a mental institution.  While the artist languished in an asylum, whose staff viewed his belief that he was a great artist as signs of his mental state, his paintings began to receive recognition and their prices rose. Unfortunately none of this benefitted Blakelock’s family or himself.  His paintings became so valued that they were forged to such an extent that Blakelock became the most forged artist in America. Originally a Hudson River School painter, Blakelock developed a unique style of luminous, introspective, nocturnal scenes bathed in an eerie moonlit atmosphere. The artist is best known today as a romantic visionary who exhibited modernist tendencies that were unique for his time. 

Pool in the Adirondacks is an example of Blakelock’s early Hudson River School phase in its literalism and concern for detail.  Yet even in this painting, especially in its somewhat melancholic mood, there is a hint of Blakelock’s later, highly introspective style.

Reference

Karen O. Janovy, Janice Drie  The Unknown Blakelock, Lincoln, Nebraska: Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, 2008. ISBN-13: 978-0977802876