William Trost Richards

William Trost Richards (1833-1905)

William Trost Richards was a Philadelphia native who began his career designing and illustrating ornamental metalwork. His career as a landscape and marine painter developed in the studio of the versatile German-trained immigrant Paul Weber. Under Weber's tutelage Richards, along with William Stanley Haseltine, refined his precocious talent and gained early recognition from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he first exhibited at age nineteen and was elected an Academician the following year. In New York in 1854 Richards met John F. Kensett, Sanford Gifford, Frederic Church, and Jasper Cropsey. Firmly committed to the artist's life, Richards embarked on an 1855-56 study tour to Europe with Haseltine and Alexander Lawrie. He returned to Philadelphia a skilled, conscientious student of nature devoted to the precepts of the Hudson River School painters and was soon inspired by John Ruskin's and the Pre-Raphaelites' literal fidelity to nature.

Richards saw his career mature quickly: the National Academy of Design made him an honorary member (1862), and he was unanimously elected to the Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art (1862). In 1871 he became a full Academician at the National Academy and in 1874 joined the American Watercolor Society. All of this occurred in the midst of a frenetic and highly acclaimed schedule of participation in national and international exhibitions. Richards was a medalist at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, won the 1885 Temple Prize from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and was awarded a bronze medal at the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition. Richards made his reputation as a keen observer of nature and a sophisticated interpreter of the American landscape. By the 1860s, however, he had developed a strong interest in coastal and marine motifs, which matured into the principal subjects of the last twenty-five years of his career. The patronage of Philadelphia collector George Whitney, among others, combined with his national success, allowed Richards to travel to Europe almost yearly and to maintain houses in Germantown and, later, Coatesville, Pennsylvania, and Newport, Rhode Island. While Richards lived to see his work lose popularity in the midst of the development of Barbizon painting and Impressionism, he nonetheless retained an appreciative audience and respected position in America's cultural community. Before his death the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts awarded him its gold medal of honor.

“Breakers at Beaver Tail”, 1894

Oil on canvas, 19 ½ x 32 1/8 in. (49.5 x 81.6 cm)

Signed and dated (lower left): “Wm. T. Richards. 94”.

Gift of Mrs. Talcott Slater (1959.14)

Richards came of age when landscape painting carried the religious, nationalist, and didactic conviction of the American people's unique destiny in a new world. During the initial twenty years of his career, Richards responded by painting beautifully crafted, meticulously detailed, and handsomely conceived landscape subjects, such as In the Adirondack Mountains (1857; Saint Louis Art Museum) and In the Woods (1865; Brooklyn Museum of Art). Following his second sojourn in Europe (1866-67), the ship on which Richards was returning to America nearly foundered during a storm. The experience left a deep impression on him, and thereafter the artist increasingly turned his attention to coastal and marine subjects.

Richards interpreted his sea subjects as either emblems of comforting tranquility, such as “On the Coast of New Jersey” (1883; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) or as dynamic, at times cataclysmic, essays on nature's sublime character. “Breakers at Beavertail” exemplifies more the dynamic aspect of Richards's vision. The subject is at the southernmost part of Conanicut Island, a rocky knuckle of earth in Narragansett Bay where Richards built a family home named Gray Cliff. He loved the site and painted it on several occasions. (1) In the New Britain picture, Richards focused intently on shore, sea, and sky. There is nothing anecdotal in or about the images; only the essence of the artist's direct and spontaneous sensory experience is committed to canvas. Richards used a muted reduced palette, a facile yet frugal draftsmanship, and, as always, a marvelously articulate technique to define the powerful expressive elements of his cogent artistic vision. Employing an economy of means to achieve classic expressive ends is a hallmark of Richards's career that is quite thoroughly manifest in “Breakers at Beavertail”.

JD

Bibliography:

Linda S. Ferber, “William Trost Richards”, exhib. cat. (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum, 1973); Linda S. Ferber, "William Trost Richards (1833-1905), American Landscape and Marine Painter," Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1980; Linda S. Ferber, “Tokens of a Friendship: Miniature Watercolors by William T. Richards”, exhib. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1982); Linda S. Ferber and William H. Gerdts, “The New Path: Ruskin and the American Pre-Raphaelites”, exhib. cat. (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum, 1985); Linda S. Ferber, "Never at Fault": “The Drawings of William Trost Richards”, exhib. cat. (Yonkers: Hudson River Museum, 1986).

Notes:

1. For other representations, see Harrison S. Morris, Richards Masterpieces of the Sea (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1912), facing pp. 20, 36, and 44.