New Acquisitions
Atlantic City, New Jersey, 1872
9⅝ x 10¾ inches (sight size)
Inscribed, initialed, and dated lower right: Atlantic City New Jersey / W.T.R. 72
Provenance
Sale, Lawrences Auctioneers, Somerset, United Kingdom, April 15, 2016, lot 1564
Questroyal Fine Art, LLC, New York, from above, 2016
Private collection, Ohio, from above, 2017
Related Works
Salt Meadows, Atlantic City, New Jersey, ca. 1871-1873, transparent and opaque watercolor on paper, 6⅞ x 14 inches, signed lower left: Wm T. Richards.; on verso: #56 / Salt Meadows / Atlantic City; Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas
A High Tide at Atlantic City, 1873, opaque watercolor with touches of translucent watercolor on moderately thick, moderately textured wove paper, 8⁷⁄₁₆ x 13¹⁵⁄₁₆ inches, signed and dated lower left: W. T. Richards 1873; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York
Note
Adept in both oil and watercolor, William Trost Richards is famed for his evocative landscapes and coastal scenes. In the 1860s and early 1870s, Richards began to work in watercolor more frequently, perhaps as a result of his frequent summer trips along the New England and New Jersey coasts in which watercolor was useful for his plein air studies. Atlantic City, New Jersey, 1872, presents one such scene Richards observed while on his summer travels, ocean waves crashing against the beach toward the grassy dunes with presumably Atlantic City’s Absecon Lighthouse standing in the distance behind the trees.