THE AMERICAN MIND is generally thought of as practical, mat-
ter-of-fact and extroverted. Certainly these are conspicuous
traits in our national character. In our art the most common trend
up to the present century was naturalism. But equally characteris-
tic, if not as frequent, was the dark vein of romanticism. In litera-
ture it produced Poe, Hawthorne, Melville and Emily Dickinson. In
painting it began with Benjamin West, Washington Allston and
others who attempted the Grand Style, and was continued in a
more naturalistic style by the Hudson River School, with their huge
canvases celebrating the wonders and beauties of the continent. By
the last third of the nineteenth century the old grandiose romantic
tradition had run its course, and was giving way to the more per-
sonal, intimate romanticism of Inness, Hunt, Fuller, Newman, La
Farge, Blakelock and Ryder. Of all these, the most original figure
was that of Albert Ryder.

Ryder's art was a product of an intense inner life, little influ-
enced by the world around him or the art of others. In it the dead
wood of the older romantic school was eliminated--the nostalgia for
Italy and the old masters that had devitalized the exponents of the
Grand Style, the literalism that had encumbered the Hudson River
School. Ryder pictured the inner reality of the mind, and out of this
deep unconscious world brought forth the purest poetic imagery in
our art of the century. In form and design he was the most original
plastic artist of his time. The romantic imagination which had been
starved or misdirected in so many of his predecessors found full ex-

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