William Trost Richards | Questroyal

Moving between landscapes and seascapes, oils and watercolors, rigorous precision and luminous fluidity, William Trost Richards embraced and mastered each phase of nineteenth-century painting. His extraordinary career began in Philadelphia, where he developed his exacting technique under the German artist Paul Weber and was active in a “Forensic and Literary Circle” devoted to the study of poetry and prose. Linda Ferber, the acknowledged authority on Richards, claims that his “early perceptions of nature were largely shaped by his activities as a litterateur” who cultivated “a Wordsworthian reverence toward nature.” Thus, the foundations of Richards’s work—a firm grounding in the nature of technique and a poetic love of nature’s technicalities—were established at the very beginning of his career. As Richards’s landscapes began to attract public notice, he drew the admiration of the American Pre-Raphaelites, who elected him to their Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art in 1863. In his Book of the Artists, Henry Tuckerman praised Richards’s literalist, hyperclear woodlands as “miracles of special study” that qualified him as the “most remarkable” of the Ruskinian Pre-Raphaelites. Yet Tuckerman was a bit late in his assessment: in 1867, the year that Book of the Artists was published, Richards had already shifted his focus to marine painting. Legend has it that the artist was so moved by his seaward journey home from Europe that he changed his artistic course on the spot. The rest of his oeuvre was dedicated to the study of the sea, featuring panoramic coastal scenes and luminous seascapes. By 1873, Richards was regarded among “the best-known watercolor painters of America”—with his fluid handling of the medium effortlessly evoking the liquidity of the sea Richards won bronze medals from the Centennial Exposition of 1876 and the Paris Exposition of 1889, as well as a gold medal from the Pennsylvania Academy Centennial of 1905. The Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts mounted a major retrospective of his landscapes and seascapes in 1973. His paintings are also in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection in Madrid.