So much has been written about Ralph Blakelock's personal misfortune that -- as with Van Gogh-- it is difficult to set his paintings apart and consider them with fair objectivity. The visionary and mystical style that characterizes his later and best known work has been seen by some writers as clear evidence of his troubled states of mind, as forerunners of the delusion and psychosis that resulted in his being confined at a sanatorium for most of the last twenty years of his life. Art critic J. N. Laurvik, writing in 1915, four years before the artist's death, found Blakelock "a tragic and solitary figure who, born out of his proper time and place, is ending his sad days in a madhouse." Even noted art historian Virgil Barker, thirty-five years later, called Blakelock's story "the bitterest known tragedy in the history of American painting." Such epithets now seem both exaggerated and melodramatic. Though the artist did periodically suffer bouts of schizophrenia, he was never as thoroughly demented as these accounts suggest. He was however totally exhausted, frustrated, and embittered by years of critical disinterest and neglect of his work. Nonetheless, he continued to sketch and paint and to play the piano (a favorite pastime, and he liked to improvise themes and variations) up to the time of his death at age seventy-two.

Blakelock was born, raised, and lived his adult life in New York City. He studied at the Free Academy (which later became City College) in 1864 and afterwards at the Cooper Union, where he learned the manner and theories of the Hudson River School. Like Bierstadt, T. R. Peale and other "Eastern" artists before him, he made an extensive two-year trek to the West during 1869-71. The awesome grandeur deeply impressed him; throughout his life he held a romantic, if not reverential, attachment to wilderness that is evident in nearly all his work.

In the mid-1870s Blakelock began to evolve from a factual to a more interpretive and introspective approach. In so doing he was quite in step with several of his important contemporaries. George Inness, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and John H. Twachtman, for example, each in his own way pointed a direction for American landscape painting away from the prevailing criterion of the preceding fifty years: that, to be true to divine creation, nature had to be represented in literal detail. Blakelock became one of the most subjective and most abstract painters of the new movement. And for his deeply personal expressions of mood, wonder, and transcendence, he also came to be spurned as too experimental, too unconventional for the established exhibition opportunities of that time. With increasing public disfavor, joined by the fact that he coped poorly with business matters, he fell into extreme financial difficulty, whereupon followed the strain of supporting his large family (Blakelock and his wife had nine children). Not surprisingly, circumstances took an emotional and physical toll.

Fond of the random pattern of nature and designs made by attrition for their inherent sensory visual appeal, Blakelock would transcribe such tactile effects to his canvases by methodically building up paint surfaces, frequently admixing bitumen and varnish for the rich color depth that resulted. (In many cases this method of materials handling has also resulted in a variety of conservation problems years later.) The masses of texture might at first be read as flat design with a certain density and substance; then slowly the surface resolves into convincing spatial illusion. One sees thus the artist's typical imagery in his mature style; a landscape in which the dark foliage of trees forms a lacy decorative pattern and through which can be seen distant woods, sky, and a sun or moon glowing silvery-green or mellow gold. The Hunter Museum's Landscape with Moon aptly fits this description. Blakelock transformed the appearance of nature to evoke for the viewer the emotions and contemplations that a scene worked in him.

Ironically, before the artist's death critical interest in the work revived (but for no particular benefit or remuneration to himself or his family). Sad to say, too, as his painting came finally to be understood and appreciated and as the sales improved dramatically his style was blatantly counterfeited, yet offered as Blakelock original work. He remains today perhaps the most "forged" of American artists.