William Trost Richards (1833 – 1905). Oil on canvas laid down on board. 9 1/2 x 15 1/2 inches. Signed lower left: W M. The Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, Ohio. Sale, Phillips, New York, New York, January 27, 1983, Lot 113. Howard and Merle Melton. Melton Park Gallery, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Private Collection, New York. Stillwater, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State University Museum of Art, February – March, 1998. A native of Philadelphia, William Trost Richards had a fifty-year career as a noted landscape and marine painter whose mature work combined extremely detailed aspects of nature with atmospheric qualities. He was especially innovative for his time because he borrowed informal composition techniques from the Pre-Raphaelites of England, painting lights and colors outdoors as he actually observed them. His formal education ended at age thirteen when he quit school to support his family by working as a commercial draughtsman designing ornamental metal fixtures. He studied painting privately with William Stanley Haseltine and Paul Weber from whom he learned a meticulous graphic technique. He was supported by local persons in Philadelphia who financed a year of study in Europe from 1855 to 1856, and in 1867, he went abroad for a second time. He did numerous pencil drawings and paintings of Italy and Switzerland and much painting along English coasts. As a young painter, Richards came of age during the heyday of Hudson River School artists such as Thomas Cole and Asher Durand. Though he never lost his passion for the romanticized style of this earlier generation, over time Richards landscapes evolved to include more scientific detail and a sense of immediacy. By the 1850s, he had decided that landscape was his favorite subject matter and was especially inspired by American poetry but was much more inspired by American landscape painting, especially that of John Kensett and Frederic Edwin Church. He did a series of brilliant Adirondack landscapes and also coastal landscapes and marine subjects from New Jersey to Maine. The latter part of his career, he was firmly established as a coastal and marine painter, ever fascinated by the tumultuous phenomenon of water hitting rocks and beach. He was known to spend hours studying his scenes, astutely observing changes in light and color, carefully noting the fluid reactions in crashing waves. His works on paper–watercolor and pencil drawings–were some of his earliest and most important contributions, and hundreds of them survive in spite of an 1854 studio fire. Having been working in oil for some time, he began working in watercolor in the late 1860s, which was linked to his growing interest in the seashore. In 1878, Richards traveled to Great Britain, where he hoped to study the turbulent and wild Atlantic seacoast. This was the first of eight trips the artist would make over the next dozen years, as Richards became consumed with Englands coastal topography. Among his most favored sites were the cliffs along the Cornish coast. The item “WILLIAM TROST RICHARDS Cornish Coast, Hudson River School, Museum Provenance” is in sale since Monday, March 5, 2018. This item is in the category “Art\Paintings”. The seller is “easterngallery” and is located in New York, New York. This item can be shipped to United States.
- Medium: Oil
- Subject: Seascape/ Nautical
- Style: Hudson River School
- Listed By: Dealer or Reseller
- Region of Origin: US
- Painting Surface: Canvas laid down on board
- Color: Blue
- Features: Framed
- Width (Inches): 15.5
- Date of Creation: 1800-1899
- Originality: Original
- Height (Inches): 9.5
- Quantity Type: Single-Piece Work
- Artist: William Trost Richards
- Size: Medium (up to 36in.)
