The Story of the Cross,

ca. 1890

Albert Pinkham Ryder completed just over 150 diminutive paintings throughout his career, yet these are imbued with such mysterious, evocative, and romantic intensity that he is commonly considered America’s most significant visionary painter. His deceptively simple compositions, focused on a limited number of themes (brooding landscapes, the sea, literary subjects), were often successively reworked to achieve the rich but planar tonalist effects of the Barbizon and Symbolist painters he admired. <em>The Story of the Cross</em> is among the artist’s most impressive paintings, incorporating the simultaneously awkward yet gentle and expressive forms for which he is known, and to which this particular subject is especially well suited. One of several works Ryder produced on a Christian theme, the painting is distinct in that it is unrelated to a specific biblical story, although the composition, depicting a shepherd relating the story of the crucifixion to a young child and his mother, parallels the iconography of the flight into Egypt. Its generalized forms and exceptional lambent color lend it, appropriately, something of the aura of a medieval icon. <em>The Story of the Cross</em> forms a key part of a significant repository of works by or in imitation of Ryder at Princeton, a collection that also includes a pen-and-ink drawing by the artist after the painting.