Albert blakelock biography

Ralph Albert Blakelock was a romanticist American painter known primarily for his landscape paintings related to the Tonalism movement.
Ralph Albert Blakelock (October 15, 1847 – August 9, 1919) was a romanticist American painter known primarily for his landscape paintings related to the.
Ralph Blakelock was born in 1847 in New York City, where his father was a homeopathic physician.

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An Indian Encampment, circa 1880-90

Born in New York City, Ralph Blakelock earned a reputation for nocturnal, misty scenes, especially moonlit landscapes, large oak trees, and Indian encampments. He also did a small number of floral still lifes.

His work has a mysterious quality, which some associated with the type of music he habitually played on the piano during interludes from his painting. Towards the end of his career, his paintings became increasingly haunting, a reflection of his insanity brought on by horrible poverty and his inability to support his family of nine children.

He was both a late exponent of the Hudson River School of painting and also of the American West. He also foreshadowed the romantic, visionary, and modern tendencies that marked the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries. This romanticism, especially of escapism, was increasingly pronounced towards the end of his career.

Blakelock was the son of a prominent English-born, New York physician, and first took medical studies, but his love of music and art led him away from medicine. He graduat

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Ralph Albert Blakelock

“Davidson has written the first true, full-length monograph on an artist who was one of America’s best-known painters at the turn of the 20th century.”—Choice

“Blakelock is an artist who provides a fascinating excursion around the major schools and traditions of American painting of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. His purpose is to bring to light a significant but relatively neglected artist through meticulous analysis of his life and paintings, as well as the literary, sociological, psychological, and even religious phenomena which might have served as an inspiration. Abraham Davidson has made an excellent job of the difficult task of combining biography and artistic analysis.”—Jeanne Chenault Porter, Penn State University

Abraham A. Davidson is Professor of Art History at the Tyler School of Art, Temple University. His previous books include Ben Solowey (1988) and Early American Modernist Painting, 1910–1935 (1981; 1994).

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Ralph Albert Blakelock (October 15, 1847 – August 9, 1919) was a romanticist painter from the United States.

Biography

Ralph Blakelock was born in New York City on October 15, 1847.[1] His father was a successful physician.[1] Blakelock initially set out to follow in his footsteps, and in 1864 began studies at the Free Academy of the City of New York (now known as the City College). He dropped out after his third term, opting to forgo formal education. From 1869-72 he traveled alone through the American West, wandering far from American settlements and spending time among the American Indians.[1] Largely self-taught as an artist, he began producing competent landscapes, as well as scenes of Indian life, based on his notebooks he filled while traveling and on his personal memories and feelings.[1] Blakelock's works were exhibited in the National Academy of Design.

In 1877 Blakelock married Cora Rebecca Bailey; they had nine children. In art, Blakelock was a genius, yet, in business dealings and in monetary transactions he proved a failure. He found it difficult, if not crushing