Rolling Surf, 1900

Provenance

Private collection, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Sotheby’s, New York, Sale of September 26, 1990, lot 46
Newman Galleries, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Sale, Freeman’s, Chicago, Illinois, December 7, 2025, lot 12

Related Works

The Bell Buoy, Newport, Rhode Island, 1891, oil on canvas, 40 ⁷⁄₁₆ x 72 ¼ inches, signed lower right: Wm. T. Richards.; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

On the Coast of New Jersey, 1883, oil on canvas, 40 ¼ x 72 ¼ inches, signed and dated lower right: Wm. T. Richards. 1883.; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

New Jersey Beach, 1901, oil on canvas, 28 ¼ x 48 ¼ inches, signed and dated lower left: Wm T. Richards. 1901; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Note

Few American painters of the late nineteenth century captured the sea as powerfully as William Trost Richards. Though the subject is unidentified, it may depict Rhode Island, possibly Newport or near Narragansett Bay, where Richards lived and worked. Painted late in his life, this larger scale seascape divides a cloud filled sky from a choppy green sea, with a breaking wave and lone seagull rendered in meticulous detail and fidelity to nature.

Richards’ works are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of the National Academy of Design, New York; the Brooklyn Museum; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C., among many others.