Albert Pinkham Ryder
The Spouter Inn, New Bedford, in Melville’s Moby Dick, had on its wall a strange painting, ”thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced”, with such ”unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the England hags, had endeavoured to delineate chaos bewitched.” It was ”a boggy,…