Whatever you might want a painting to be, from realist to symbolist to abstract, you can find your ideal in the work of Edwin Dickinson.

Don't get the wrong idea - this American master didn't change styles gratuitously. His paintings embraced all possibilities, although not always in the same proportions.

However Dickinson painted a particular picture, whether more realist or more abstract, the language of the situation fit him as perfectly as a tailored suit.

Dickinson, who died in 1976 at age 85, was impossible to categorize. He always described himself simply as "a general painter in oil."

That's all one needs to say about his aesthetic orientation, but, as a retrospective exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts demonstrates, it's saying a lot.

"General painter in oil" explains, for instance, why Dickinson was revered by other artists. He was never caught up in stylistic fads or tactical careerism.

He painted what he felt more than what he saw. At various stages of his long career, those feelings assumed various forms on the canvas - alternately as dark symbolism, semi-abstraction, ethereal landscape, occasionally even as straightforward realism.

Emotional intensity and dreamlike introspection, described in a distinctively somber palette, characterize his art over more than six decades.

Most of the 67 paintings and 27 works on paper in this exhibition, which was organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, blend observation, remembrance and imagination in equal measure.

This formula can make some of Dickinson's paintings difficult to read, yet it's largely responsible for their formidable magnetism.

The strongest evidence for this observation hangs in the gallery of the exhibition devoted to what are described as Dickinson's "symbolical" paintings. These are among the largest, darkest, most emotionally intense pictures that Dickinson made. Most date from the 1920s.

Four paintings in this gallery address a theme that, while particular to his life, resonates in all lives - the deaths of a mother and of a beloved sibling and the death of the artist's closest friend, all early in Dickinson's life.

The paintings are allegories of pathos. With one exception, a group portrait from 1916 called Interior, they're populated by still, pale, corpselike bodies submerged in ghostly gloom.

Yet they're elegiac, not morbid. They ruminate on death and loss, and on the pain of remembrance, in a way that comes as close to the gravity of Old Master painting as one can find in 20th-century art.

Paintings such as The Fossil Hunters, An Anniversary and Woodland Scene establish a frame of reference for Dickinson that excludes frivolity, gaiety or evanescence. No bright colors, either.

His self-portraits - 11 are hung in one gallery - reinforce the impression of high seriousness that the paintings imply.

In the 1920s, with dark hair and mustache, the artist bore a striking resemblance to playwright Eugene O'Neill. As an older man with a spade-shaped beard, Dickinson looked more like an Old Testament prophet.

As a painter, Dickinson represented an intriguing mix of traditional romanticism and modernist experimentation. His ability to reconcile these two disparate philosophies makes him special among artists of his generation.

Edwin Dickinson was born in Seneca Falls, N.Y., on Oct. 11, 1891, son of a Presbyterian minister. His mother died of "tuberculosis of the bone" when Edwin was only 11. The loss of his mother and his father's subsequent remarriage proved to be a traumatic sequence of events that figures prominently in Dickinson's art, especially during the 1920s.

As a young man, he was further shaken by the suicide of a beloved older brother, Burgess, in 1913. The two were living together in Greenwich Village while Edwin attended the Art Students League, where he studied with William Merritt Chase and Frank DuMond.

The other major influence on Dickinson's art was Charles W. Hawthorne, who operated a summer art school in Provincetown on Cape Cod. Dickinson would live on the Cape, in Provincetown and Wellfleet, for many years. Many of his landscapes were made there.

The landscapes aren't meticulously detailed panoramas but gauzy, intimate views. Dickinson painted many of them as "first strikes" - on the scene and in one session.

A few landscapes are essentially realist, but painted in his typically subdued palette, as if the scene were viewed through a white scrim. Sheldrake Winter, a view of a lake beyond a long bare tree, is done primarily in white, umber and a dirty violet.

The landscapes are brighter than the gloomy allegories, as if Dickinson had discovered light after years in a darkened room. Some are ethereal as dreams, as if Dickinson had painted the scenes with his eyes closed after viewing them for a short time.

There are a few pictures in this show that Dickinson himself might not have fully understood, because they look so odd. Ruin at Daphne, which he worked on for 10 years, might be the most striking example.

Daphne is a place in Syria, a country Dickinson never visited. He concocted a fragmented scene that looks as if it might be an antique ruin, with ceremonial stairways, Roman arches like those in the Baths of Caracalla, and pillars with Corinthian capitals.

At the right, cantilevered steps coil around a column. A statue of a rearing horse is another prominent feature. Dickinson also painted in a number of birds, the picture's only living things.

Ruin at Daphne looks odd in part because it appears to be unfinished. The periphery of the scene is drawn monochromatically in a bright red-orange pigment. Only the central portion is fully modeled, in white, gray and brown.

As with much of Dickinson's art regardless of subject, the painting conveys a sense of a powerful interior vision. Because ruins are artifacts of history, the painting reads persuasively as a rumination on a once vibrant past, in this case the artist's early life.

Many artists change styles in the course of a long career. With Dickinson, the viewer comes to realize that his broad range of subjects and techniques are devoted to a single consistent purpose, examination of the self.

This, I think, is what makes Dickinson's art so incisive and memorable. For an artist, describing nature by transcribing it is painless, but produces only superficial emotions such as sentimentality and nostalgia.

Revealing one's sorrows and anxieties in public as Dickinson did is bound to affect an artist's audience far more profoundly.