RALPH ALBERT BLAKELOCK 1847-1919
Twilight, c. 1898
Oil on canvas, 20 X 30" (50.80 x 76.20 cm.)
Signed, lower right
Gift of H. H. Stambaugh, 919-0-103

Twilight is representative of a large body of poetically conceived nocturnal landscapes produced by Ralph Albert Blakelock almost exclusively from 1883 to 1898 that share the artist's signature chiaroscuro treatment of anonymous pastoral settings. Like other works from this stylistic phase, Twilight displays Blakelock's characteristically reductive approach to composition in which dark foliate shapes placed in relief against the light of a night sky provide the principal formal scheme. The hallucinatory qualities of these evocative images have become emblematic of the subjective response to nature that emerged in late nineteenth-century American painting, causing Blakelock's name to be linked with artists Albert Pinkham Ryder and George Inness. In a narrower, more compelling context, however, Blakelock's unique language of light and dark has come to be interpreted as a metaphor for the alternating emotions of hope and despair that threaded through his troubled mind.
It is impossible to discuss Blakelock's art without referring to the tragic ironies of his life. His rise from the ranks of the unknown and untrained to the unlikely status of being the most highly publicized American artist at the turn of the century had as much to do with the press's sensationalized accounts of his plight as an insane, unrecognized genius as it did with the merit of his art. Public fascination with the artist, whose career was described as "one of the saddest romances of American art," generated a flood of spurious Blakelock canvases as early as 1903. The numerous forgeries, and Blakelock's obsessively repetitive imagery, his failure to date most of his work, and the lack of thorough documentation, have complicated the task of analyzing his oeuvre and heightened the romantic aura surrounding his life.
Blakelock was born and raised in New York City where he attended the Free Academy of New York, now City College of New York, from 1864 to 1866. He left school prior to graduating and within a short time and apparently with no formal training, made his exhibition debut at the National Academy of Design in 1868, exhibiting there annually until 1873 and sporadically thereafter. Blakelock's early efforts are largely prosaic demonstrations of his assimilation of the Hudson River School landscape aesthetic. However, like Landscape with Cows, a work he probably executed in the 1870s, his early paintings occasionally prefigure his later style in the patterned effects of foliage against sky, a particular attention to light, and a prevailing sense of stillness. The simple landscape vocabulary established in Blakelock's early work assumed a greater atmospheric resonance with his stylistic response to the Barbizon aesthetic in the 1880s. The rich, dark tonalities, enhanced by Blakelock's often idiosyncratic glazing techniques, fused with his preference for moonlit or sunset scenes to create hauntingly introspective visions whose origins lay in the imagination rather than observed reality.
Blakelock's 1877 marriage and his eight surviving children placed him under enormous financial and emotional stress. Despite occasional sales to important collectors and the supportive friendships of a number of artists, Blakelock's uniquely subjective canvases failed to find wide appreciation. Apparently predisposed to melancholia, the artist suffered a mental collapse in 1891 and was institutionalized briefly. Throughout the 1890s his emotional state gradually deteriorated, manifesting in delusions of grandeur and eccentric dress. A violent episode in 1899 resulted in the artist's uninterrupted confinement until 1916, after which he was hospitalized periodically until his death. Ironically the recognition that he had long sought came to him only after he was institutionalized. One reporter observed in 1903, "Now that he is confined in an asylum for the insane ... no collection ... is thought to be complete without a canvas or two by him." By that time, however, he was beyond recovery and forged canvases bearing his name competed with his own in an active market. The essential quietude of Blakelock's landscapes belies the tensions of his daily existence. As in Twilight and comparable works of the 1890s, Blakelock seems to have found relief in repeatedly expressing the poetic resolution of the light and dark aspects of the diurnal cycle that paralleled the opposing emotions that gripped him. A short poem signed R. A. Blakelock affixed to the painting's frame sums up the artist's enduring concerns:

What if the clouds one short dark night, hide the blue sky until morn appears When the bright sun that cheers soon again will rise to shine upon earth for endless years.

BARBARA DAYER GALLATI