so distraught with debris of the
world for which he could seem to find no other place; I have spent
some of the rare and lovelier moments of my experience with this
gentlest and sweetest of other-world citizens; I have felt with
ever-living delight the excessive loveliness of his glance and of his
smile and heard that music of some far-away world which was his
laughter; I have known that wisdom which is once and for all wisdom
for the artist, that confidence and trust that for the real artist
there is but one agency for the expression of self in terms of beauty,
the eye of the imagination, that mystical third somewhere in the mind
which transposes all that is legitimate to expression. To Ryder the
imagination was the man; he was a poet painter, living ever outside
the realm of theory.

He was fond of Corot, and at moments I have thought of him as the heir
and successor to some of Corot's haunting graces; but there was all
the difference between them that there is between lyric pure and
tragic pure. Ryder has for once transcribed all outer semblances by
means of a personality unrelated to anything other than itself, an
imagination belonging strictly to our soil and specifically to our
Eastern geography. In his autographic quality he is certainly our
finest genius, the most creative, the most racial. For our genius, at
its best, is the genius of the evasive; we are born lovers of the
secret element, the mystery in things.

How many of our American painters have given real attention to Ryder?
I find him so much the legend among professional artists, this master
of arabesque, this first and foremost of our designers, this real
creator of pattern, this first of all creators of tragic landscape,
whose pictures are sacred to those that revere distinction and power
in art. He had in him that finer kind of reverence for the element of
beauty which finds all things somehow lovely. He understood best of
all the meaning of the grandiose, of everything that is powerful; none
of his associates in point of time rose to just that sublimated
experience; not Fuller, not Martin, not Blakelock, though each of
these was touched to a special expression. They are more derivative
than Ryder, more the children of Barbizon.

Ryder gave us first and last an incomparable sense of pattern and
austerity of mood. He saw with an all too pitiless and pitiful eye the
element of helplessness in things, the complete succumbing of things
in nature to