Albert Pinkham Ryder refused to go out during daylight. Believing sunlight would damage his eyes, he roamed New York's streets at night instead, returning to a studio that contemporaries described as extraordinary in its disorder: papers, milk bottles, ashes, and dead mice piled waist-high, the floor used for sleeping to avoid bedbugs. His own summation of his philosophy was characteristically concise: the artist must live to paint, not paint to live.

Born in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1847, Ryder came from a whaling port, and the sea informed his work throughout. He moved to New York in 1867 to study at the National Academy of Arts, but by the early 1880s had abandoned any interest in accurate description. His subject was emotional truth, rendered through moonlit water, simplified forms, and figures drawn from literature rather than observation. Poe, Chaucer, and maritime legend supplied him with imagery; what mattered, in his own view, was not that a storm cloud was accurate in colour but that the storm itself was present in the picture.

The technical consequences of this method were severe. He built canvases up slowly and obsessively, applying paint over wet underlayers and returning to pictures across months or years, reportedly incorporating unconventional materials including candle wax. All approximately 150 canvases he produced are now significantly cracked, and colours that contemporaries compared to precious stones have largely faded. Jonah (c.1885, 69.2 x 87.3 cm) and Flying Dutchman (c.1887, 36.1 x 43.8 cm), both at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, are among his best-known works. Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, and Jackson Pollock all acknowledged his influence.