The artist must…await the season of fruitage without haste, without worldly ambition, without vexation of the spirit.” This almost ritualistic approach may have grown out of Ryder’s perhaps unconscious desire to delay separation from his work. Yet, according to his own account, time was needed to achieve the proper spiritual inspiration: “Art is long. Chronic eye trouble, aggravated by age, further impeded Ryder’s progress. The long, arduous creation of Macbeth and the Witches typifies Ryder’s works begun in the mid-to-late-1890s. Sanden’s correspondence with Ryder between 19 outlines the artist’s slow progress, although Ryder was optimistic in 1899, when he wrote that “the Macbeth…more slowly…will grow in grandeur and soon have a light and charm that I wish to be in it.” By 1899 or even earlier, he had started the present version for Dr. Ryder had approached the same subject in an earlier, smaller painting of the same title, which he had begun in the early 1880s. The turmoil is prefigured in the tortured landscape. In a foreboding scene, Macbeth and Banquo, military leaders of the Scottish king, encounter the three Witches, who prophesize the chain of violent events to come. Based on act 1, scene 3 of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Ryder’s Macbeth and the Witches engages with the theme of supernatural intervention in human events and man’s helplessness in his mortal confrontation with such forces.
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