Ralph A. Blakelock

Born in Brooklyn, the son of a successful homeopathic doctor, Ralph Albert Blakelock attended public schools before entering the Free Academy of the City of New York (now City College) in 1864 to study medicine. He initially received good grades but left the five-year course in 1866 and began to paint. Blakelock was primarily self-taught but may have received guidance from his uncle James A. Johnston, a self-taught painter who was a friend of the artists Frederic Edwin Church and James Renwick Brevoort. By 1867 Blakelock was exhibiting at the National Academy of Design.

Not interested in foreign study, Blakelock traveled west in 1869 and 1871, stopping in Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and California; he also went to Mexico, Panama, Jamaica, and the West Indies. These trips were to have an important impact upon his work, for a romanticized view of the American wilderness and native American life would be a major theme throughout his career.

Blakelock married in 1877 and moved to East Orange, New Jersey, where he worked for a Newark art factory as a painter of plaques and decorative panels. He began to receive some recognition in the 1880s and produced some of his best known works during this period. He was occasionally patronized by such prominent collectors as Catholina Lambert and Thomas B. Clarke but often sold his paintings for paltry sums through minor auction houses and art dealers, pressed by the need to support his growing family. Blakelock experienced severe financial difficulties from 1889 to 1893, and during that time he exhibited only once, at the National Academy of Design. In 1891 he suffered a mental breakdown, reportedly after a collector refused to pay the anticipated price for a picture. His condition worsened, and in 1899 he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He spent much of the rest of his life shuffling between hospitals.

Ironically, soon after he entered the hospital, Blakelock began receiving the critical recognition and commercial success that had evaded him earlier, though it was too late to help him or his family. In 1900 he received his first and only award, at the Universal Exposition in Paris. His paintings brought substantial prices beginning in 1904 with the sale of Frederick S. Gibbs's collection, and his works quickly inspired a large number of forgeries.