The Heckscher Museum of Art’s collection spans 500 years with particular emphasis on art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. American landscape painting and work by Long Island artists, past and present, are particular strengths, as is American and European modernism.
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The visionary paintings of Ralph Albert Blakelock stand alone in American art. Blakelock was largely self-taught and his early works are realistic nature studies in the manner of the Hudson River School. In 1869, and again in 1872, he traveled to the West, sketching the landscape and Indian life. By the 1880s, the artist's idiosyncratic style had become less concerned with description than with light effects, design, and texture. In his dramatic moonlit scenes, such as The Poetry of Moonlight, the strong silhouette of the foreground trees creates a surface pattern across the canvas at odds with the three-dimensional space evoked beyond. Blakelock's large family of nine children caused him great financial and emotional stress and in 1891 he suffered a nervous breakdown. Eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia, his behavior became erratic and unpredictable, and in 1899 his mental state necessitated institutionalization, first at the Long Island Hospital at Kings Park, and subsequently at the Middletown (N.Y.) State Hospital where he spent much of the remainder of his life. Shortly after Blakelock was first hospitalized, his work began to achieve critical and commercial success. By 1903, forgeries began to appear, becoming quite common the following decade and making Blakelock scholarship particularly problematical to the present day. In 1916, a moonlight scene, Brook by Moonlight (Toledo Museum of Art), brought an unprecedented $20,000 at auction, the highest price ever paid at auction for a living artist. August Heckscher must have especially liked Blakelock's work, as he acquired five of his paintings before 1920, making him the best represented artist in his collection.