Ralph Albert Blakelock - Moonlight, ca. 1885-1889

 

Ralph Albert Blakelock - Moonlight, ca. 1885-1889
oil on canvas,  27 1/16 x 32 in. (68.7 x 81.3 cm)
Brooklyn Museum

Ralph Albert Blakelock’s wide-ranging tours of the American West in 1869 and 1871 inspired him to paint Native subjects for many years. He was among the first painters to depart from a “documentary” treatment of Native Americans, choosing instead to describe them in vaguely readable groups set in dark and moody moonlit settings. This approach immediately marked his landscape settings as American but left the story line up to the active imaginations of his late nineteenth-century American audience.