Chauncey F. Ryder, N.A.
(American, 1868-1949)

"First Snow on Moosilauke, N.H.", 1868

oil on canvas backed by wood panel
signed lower left, titled and signed on handwritten label en verso, and titled on artist plaque.
Framed.
32" x 44-1/4"

Notes: He has searched for, and found, all the intimacies of nature in New England. So keen an observer, so perfect a lover, so delicate and so deliberate an interpreter, would not long remain a stranger to a new and more opulent mistress.

--Los Angeles Times , Sunday, April 5, 1925

The newspaper review of Chauncey Ryder's exhibit at Cannell and Chaffin's Gallery in Los Angeles beautifully expresses the enduring legacy of Ryder's paintings. Indeed, Ryder's native New England was his mistress, which he devoted his life pursuing throughout Connecticut, New York and New Hampshire, where he spent almost the last forty years of his life. Foster, an Impressionist scion, who pushed representational elements beyond optical illusion into the terrain of abstraction, was a visionary ahead of his American contemporaries. After studying at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Smith Institute, he moved to Paris, joining the art colony at Etaples and studying under Jean-Paul Laurens at the Academie Julian. There Ryder exhibited at the Paris Salon and was exposed to a melange of avant-garde movements - Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, early German Expressionism, as well as the Japanese woodblocks of Hokusai, which influenced all the above-mentioned movements. The dark outlines and contrast of matte, monochromatic colors in the prints left a lasting impression on Ryder. How to create movement through blocks of color and line instead of modeling was something that fascinated Ryder, which he combined with the rapid impasto of Impressionism, using the optics of the human eye to blend pigments instead of the palette. Ryder's landscapes were admired for their vigorous brushwork, for their synergy, captured through their reduction of nature into bold shapes rendered through a muted, but painterly unified palette. The painting of Mt. Moosilauke is a fine example of this. The undertones of cool greens that underscore the horizon and winter vegetation, in the painting offered here, are characteristic of Ryder. His predilection for gray-green tones gave rise to the term "Ryder green" to describe his typical color scheme. Ryder painted many landscapes of southern New Hampshire after moving there in 1910, including this fine view in the southwestern part of the state.

Ryder enjoyed much acclaim during his lifetime, including an honorable mention in the Paris Salon of 1907, and numerous awards at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition and at the 1937 Paris International Exposition. He was represented throughout his career by the dealer William Macbeth, who procured the sale of his paintings to many wealthy east coast patrons, including President Woodrow Wilson and his wife Ellen, who chose to commemorate their 25th wedding anniversary with the purchase of a Ryder landscape, "Valley of Assisi".