William Trost Richards
William Trost Richards
1833 - 1905
American painter (see fig.). In 1846–7 he attended the Central High School in Philadelphia, PA, but left before graduating in order to help support his family. He worked full-time as a designer and illustrator of ornamental metalwork from 1850 to 1853 and then part-time until 1858. During this period he studied draughtsmanship and painting with Paul Weber (1823–1916) and probably had some lessons at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, where he exhibited in 1852. The following year he was elected full Academician there. In 1855–6 he toured Europe with WILLIAM STANLEY HASELTINE and Alexander Lawrie (1828–1917), studying for several months in Düsseldorf. Finding contemporary European landscape painting less inspiring than that of America, he returned to Philadelphia.
Richards probably read the first two volumes of JOHN RUSKIN’s Modern Painters (London, 1843–6) during the 1850s, for soon after he began to show an interest in geological subjects and spent the summers sketching in the Catskills, the Adirondacks and the mountains of Pennsylvania (see fig.). Striving for the fidelity to nature he had seen in Pre-Raphaelite painting in an exhibition of British art at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1858, Richards began to paint outdoors. In the 1860s he executed several highly detailed landscapes, such as June Woods (1864; New York, NY Hist. Soc.), and botanical studies. In March 1863 Richards was unanimously elected to membership of the Society for the Advancement of Truth in Art, an American Pre-Raphaelite organization. In 1862 he was made an honorary member of the National Academy of Design, New York, but he did not become a full Academician until 1871.
From 1868 to 1874 Richards summered annually on the East Coast. This inspired the partiality for coastal topography that persisted throughout his career. Characteristic of his handling of this theme are panoramic views of waves and uninhabited, wet beaches as in On the Coast of New Jersey (1883; Washington, DC, Corcoran Gal. A.). A luminist light, painted in harmonious, silvery tones, is reflected on the sand and the water. At first he treated these marine subjects as meticulously as his woodland views, but eventually his technique became broader. In the 1870s he developed his use of watercolour from delicate and transparent washes to opaque layers of gouache (see fig.). From 1874 he exhibited with the American Water Color Society, and from 1875 to 1884 he sent approximately 185 watercolours to the Philadelphia collector George Whitney.
In 1879–80 Richards was in Europe, for he felt that his style was becoming old-fashioned and that he needed fresh subject-matter. Works from this period, many featuring the English coast (New York, Brooklyn Mus A.), are tightly painted and opaque. When he returned to America in 1881, he built a summer-house in Newport, RI, that gave him ready access to the sea and made sketching out of doors in watercolour and oil convenient. Richards’s interest in capturing natural light and reflections can be associated with similar concerns of the Impressionists, but his handling was tighter and his palette more tonal; it is only in his oil sketches that an Impressionist freshness and luminosity occur. In 1890 Richards moved permanently to Newport and travelled between there and Europe. He remained active until the end of his life, painting both landscapes and seascapes. [Annette Blaugrund. "Richards, William Trost." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 10, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T071957.]
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