Landscape

Albert Pinkham Ryder

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This landscape is surprisingly modern in its simplified details, flattened forms, and patterned composition. A shepherd and animals of the sort that had appeared in Ryder’s earlier, Barbizon influenced paintings are here overwhelmed by the setting’s stylized elements: a stream rushing along a rigid diagonal, sinuous hills filling the middle ground, and clouds rising in contrasting bands and culminating in undulating deep-blue shapes outlined in light. Works such as this one prompted the avant-garde painter Marsden Hartley, born thirty years after Ryder, to call him a “master of the arabesque.”

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.

Metropolitan Museum of Art