Ralph A. Blakelock

  God I love me a good nature painting. I can stare at them for just as long as I can the real thing. Something about this one stood out to me though: it’s quizzical, the artists use of shadows in this painting. His focus was the trees, the sprawling branches and shrubbery taking up most of the canvas. And yet they’re dulled in his color choice, giving a cream-colored sky the spotlight. There’s a peak of a river that reflects the soft color of the sky, cutting through the almost black ground. Blakelock does an amazing job of using contrast to create a different vision than what I usually see – bright, sunny nature scenes that give feelings of the same description – and leaves me with a calm and tranquil scene of sitting under a sprawl of branches as I rest away from the sun.
  Maybe it’s the inner hipster in me, but despite the research I’ve done on this man, I can’t find this painting listed anywhere in his works except for the Frye Art Gallery in Seattle, WA, and that makes me so happy. He’s officially listed as having only 64 paintings throughout his life, but despite that, I guess I found a 65th. It makes me so curious about the rest of the unlisted paintings that could be out there.

  The life of Ralph A. Blakelock was both unique and simultaneously common for his time. His father wanted him to follow in his footsteps, pushing him to become a doctor and help support his family. After a couple of years of his studies though, he quit and had his first exhibition in 1867. As his art sat in the National Academy of New York, he decided to travel to the wild wild west, where the journey forever altered his pieces.
  I’m usually focused on older art, specifically art created outside of America. As I learned and explored more of Blakelock though, I think I finally found a style I am more than ecstatic to fixate on. He is described as conforming to Romanticism, showing nature and society clashing in a beautiful and sublime manner. But his work is also broken down into a more niche movement: Tonalism. Tonalism was what most of his artwork was – dark, brooding, misty, using darker pigments with splashes of color usually only in his skies. Not all, but a big sum of his works was focused on moonlight. Gorgeous, dark scenery of moonlight splashing on silhouettes of trees and lakes. They’re stunning, and wildly successful while he was alive.
  Despite his success, he married a childhood friend and decided to have NINE children (dummy), which put him in a bit of a financial pickle to say the least. Remember when I said I was curious the other paintings of his just floating out there, obscure and maybe just lost to time forever? This is what I believed caused this. Despite his beautiful paintings - one of them setting the record for the highest bought painting of an alive artist – it still wasn’t enough to fund the family he made. He started selling these paintings for way less than they were worth, one of them even going for under $1,000 after he had his ninth child. This lifestyle not only caused this loss of his art, but it also was the cause of a typical artists story: a slow descent into madness.
  After the selling of the painting, Blakelock went into a deep depression, which eventually landed him in an insane asylum being treated for “dementia praecox” – what we now know as schizophrenia. Ironically, the staff knew nothing of his success as an artist and chalked up his tales of being in National Museums as being one of his delusions. He spent most of his remaining life in mental institutions, while his works gained more recognition as he was instituted and selling works for thousands of dollars. These thousands of dollars were being sent to a fraud Trust Fund set up by a woman who lived her life as a con artist, so his family saw none of it.
  There’s another explanation of this art being unlisted in places though, which is a lot of his artwork started being forged in the early 1900’s. So much so, he gained the title “the most forged artist in America”. Despite this fact though, Ralph A. Blakelock made a name for himself. He still hangs in Museums around the nation, a few of them even being in the Smithsonian American Art Museum.