About this work
This hazy, dream-drenched canvas depicts the famous flying horse, Pegasus, surrounded by figures drawn from ancient Greek mythology.
A poet astride the winged horse is shown leaving the land of the Muses after seeking inspiration for his art.
The dark figure riding atop Pegasus reads as Bellerophon; to the right, a woman faintly equipped with a shield and shoulder armor is likely Athena; a second female figure, harder to identify, may be one of the Muses themselves. Ryder renders all of this in his characteristic mode — forms half-dissolved in amber, ochre, and deep shadow, as though the entire scene is being recalled rather than witnessed. The uncertain foreshortening of Pegasus has led scholars to suggest Ryder may have been looking at an illusionistic ceiling painting — perhaps Delacroix's horse-drawn chariot of Apollo on the ceiling of the Louvre.
Completed by 1901, *Pegasus Departing* is oil on canvas mounted on fiberboard, and is held in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, gifted by collector John Gellatly. The work's creation was famously contentious: when Gellatly pestered Ryder to finish the painting for his new salon, the angered artist scarred the canvas with a metal comb rather than give it up — the resulting structural damage is still visible in X-rays of the work.
Ryder eventually repainted the image, blurring many of its forms; at some point the damaged canvas was transferred to panel. That turbulent history is oddly fitting. After his trips to Europe, during which he encountered the Romantic imagination of Blake, Turner, and Wagner's operas, Ryder's horses became Pegasus — the literal and symbolic leap from observed landscape to pure myth. The shift from representation to metaphor, in both subject and paint handling, is the essence of Ryder's contribution.
As wall art, *Pegasus Departing* rewards a room that isn't afraid of mood. Its palette — all smoldering browns, muted golds, and spectral grays — sits comfortably in low, warm light, where its forms seem to shift as the hour changes. It's a work for readers, for late-night rooms, for anyone drawn to the moment where ancient myth and personal feeling become the same thing. Small in scale but vast in atmosphere, it is, as painter Bill Jensen once said of Ryder's work, made of stardust — achieved through a limited palette and experimental glazes that somehow produce something luminous and inexhaustible.
