Then I raced around the fields like a colt let loose, and literally bellowed for joy.

Nature is a teacher who never deceives. When I grew weary with the futile struggle to imitate the canvases of the past, I went out in the fields, determined to serve nature as faithfully as I had served art. In my desire to be accurate I became lost in a maze of detail. Try as I would, my colors were not those of nature. My leaves were infinitely below the standard of a leaf, my finest strokes were coarse and crude. The old scene presented itself to me framed in a opening between two trees. It stood out like a painted canvas—the deep blue of a midday sky—a solitary tree, brilliant with the green of early summer, a foundation of brown earth and gnarled roots. There was no detail to vex the eye. Three solid masses of form and color -- sky, foliage and earth -- the whole bathed in an atmosphere of golden lumosity. I threw my brushes aside; they were too small for the work in hand. I squeezed out big chunks of pure, moist color and taking my palette knife, I laid on blue, green, white and brown in great sweeping strokes. As I worked I saw that it was good and clean and strong. I saw nature springing to life upon my dead canvas. It was better than nature, for it was vibrating with thrill of a new creation. Exultantly I painted until the sun sank below the horizon, then I raced around the fields like a colt let loose, and literally bellow for joy.

              --  Albert Pinkham Ryder, in an interview with Adelaide Louise Samson, quoted by John Updike, Better Than Nature, NYRB (Nov. 8, 1990).