Artist Search
   
  a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z 
 William Trost Richards  (1833 - 1905)
Research : William Trost Richards

Summary

Examples of his work

Quick facts

Exhibits - current

Biography*

Museums

Book references

Magazine references

Discussion board

Signature Examples

 
Marketplace : William Trost Richards

For sale ads

Auction results*

Wanted ads

Auctions upcoming for him*

Dealers

Auction sales graphs*

What's my art worth?

Magazine ads pre-1998*

Market Alert - Free

Lived/Active: Pennsylvania/Rhode Island      Known for: marine-seascape, landscape and botanic painting
Back to Previous Page

   Login for full access
 
View AskART Services









*may require subscription

Available for William Trost Richards:

Quick facts (Styles, locations, mediums, teachers, subjects, geography, etc.) (William Richards)

yes

Biographical information (William Richards)

yes

Book references (William Richards)

157

Magazine references (William Richards)

29

Museum references (William Richards)

65

Artwork for sale (William Richards)

14
new entry!

Artwork Wanted (William Richards)

21

Dealers (William Richards)

49

Auction records - upcoming / past (William Richards)

593
new entry!

Auction high record price (William Richards)

11/29/2006

Signature Examples (William Richards)

5

Analysis of auction sales (William Richards)

yes

Discussion board entries (William Richards)

6

Image examples of works (William Richards)

556

Magazine ads pre-1998 (William Richards)

99

Sign up for Artist Alert Updates for William Trost Richards
What is an alert list?

Ad Code: 2
Presented by:
William Vareika Fine Arts
AskART Artist
- This artwork is For Sale. Click for details -
Biography from Pierce Galleries, Inc.:
William Trost Richards (American, 1833-1905):

Richards was born in Philadelphia on November 14, 1833 and he died in Newport, RI on November 9, 1905. He studied in Philadelphia with Paul Weber in 1850 and possibly at the PAFA ca. 1852 before studying in Florence, Rome and Paris from 1853-1856.

He was a member of the PAFA (1853); Association of Advanced Truth in Art (1868); Royal Academy, London; National Academy (1871, honorary) and the American Watercolor Society.

Work: Brooklyn Museum of Art; Cooper-Hewitt Museum, NYC; Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Newark Museum of Art, NJ; Art Institute of Chicago; Terra Museum of American Art.


William Trost Richards worked as an illustrator and as a designer of ornamental light fixtures for a Philadelphia firm that produced gas lamps, while studying privately the techniques of painting with German taught landscape-portrait painter Paul Weber (1823-1916). In 1852, he exhibited his first landscapes at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art and in 1853 some of his romantic drawings appeared in the portfolio "The Landscape Feeling of American Poets."

By 1855 Richards and marine-landscape painter William Stanley Hasseltine (1835-1900) sailed for Dusseldorf where Richards studied with Leutze and Albert Bierstadt, the latter of whom inspired Richards. After painting landscapes in oil in France and Italy, Richards married and returned to Germantown. Enthused by the works of Frederick Edwin Church and John Kensett by 1856, it was Church’s use of light and atmosphere that Richards began to imitate and two years later he was painting outdoors.

In 1866, Richards traveled to England and his focus turned from landscapes to marine painting. A year later a storm at sea caught the painter’s attention and he began to study the structure of waves and how weather effects the sea and shore.

In the late 1860s two notable art collectors gravitated to Richards’s work: the Reverend Elias Lyman Magoon, who in 1864 sold his collection to Matthew Vassar for the newly constructed Vassar College Art Gallery and George Whitney, who gave Richards financial security.

At the end of the Hudson River School era, Richards bought the first of many properties in and around Newport, Rhode Island (1874). Richards loosened his palette years later in the British Isles and the Channel Islands, where oftentimes he lightened his anachronistic palette to an almost green-gold overall tonality. Adorning the charm of solitude and the breadth of the sea, Richards peacefully painted on the island of Conanicut at Mackerel Cove until 1899.

Few artists are able to paint the sea and beach as well as Richards. His wet sandy beaches are often littered with portions of shipwrecks or seaweed to show that a tide has come and gone or that a storm’s fury has past and left its mark. The artist was adept at painting light coming through steep, lifting waves, the foam created when they slap to the ground and the reflective qualities surrounding them. Although Richards was a noted landscape and still life painter, he is best remembered for his incandescent shorelines.

Biography from Schwarz Gallery:
William Trost Richards was born in Philadelphia and began to draw at a young age. After the death of his father in 1847, he withdrew from Central High School to support his family and worked as a designer of ornamental metal fixtures.

Richards and William Stanley Haseltine (1835–1900) studied painting with German landscape painter Paul Weber (1823–1916) in 1850, and took classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he first exhibited in 1852 and was elected an academician the following year.  During the early 1850s he went on sketching trips to the Hudson River Valley in New York and met such noted landscape painters as Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900), Jasper F. Cropsey (1823–1900), and John F. Kensett (1816–1872).

In 1855 he went to Europe and toured the continent with Haseltine and the artist Alexander Lawrie (1828–1917).  Richards returned to Philadelphia the following year, married, and settled in Germantown. 

Early in his career Richards painted forest scenes in the extremely detailed style advocated by John Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites, and he joined the Society of Truth in Art in 1863.  Richards was elected an honorary member of the National Academy of Design in 1862 and a full academician in 1871.  Following a second visit to Europe in 1866, Richards began to concentrate on marine subjects, and he achieved fame for his depictions of coastal scenes.

Linda S. Ferber has noted that before 1874, when Richards made Newport, Rhode Island, his “permanent summer residence, summer months were largely spent traveling to various spots on the coast, from New Jersey to Maine and sketching the different ‘combinations of Rock and beach and sea.’”

He became adept at watercolor and joined the American Watercolor Society in 1874. He lived in Great Britain from 1878 to 1880 and had a studio in London.  Subsequently Richards returned to Philadelphia and spent some summers in Atlantic City and Cape May.


Source:

1. This aspect of Richards’s career is discussed in Linda S. Ferber and William H. Gerdts, The New Path: Ruskin and the American Pre-Raphaelites [exh. cat.] (New York: The Brooklyn Museum, 1985), pp. 214–28.

2. Linda S. Ferber, William Trost Richards: American Landscape and Marine Painter, 1833–1905 [exh. cat.] (New York: The Brooklyn Museum, 1973), p. 31.

Biography from Edgartown Art Gallery:
A native of Philadelphia born in 1833, 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.  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.

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 a 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.  Watercolor was best for plein air sketching and was excellent for expressing the atmospheric effects he sought to achieve.  Two patrons of his watercolor painting were Elias L. Magoon and George Whitney, and their support allowed him to work without the worry about money.

Richards was a member of the PAFA (1853); Association of Advanced Truth in Art (1868); Royal Academy, London; National Academy (1871, honorary) and the American Watercolor Society. The artist died in Newport, Rhode Island in 1905.

Biography from Newman Galleries:
Born in Philadelphia on November 14, 1833, William Trost Richards was a pupil of Paul Weber.  In 1853, he went abroad to study for three years in Florence, Rome, Paris and Düsseldorf.  He began to paint marine subjects in 1867, and from 1874 spent his summers in Newport, Rhode Island, where he settled permanently in 1890.

The artist received a medal at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, the Temple Medal from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1885, and a Bronze Medal at the Paris Exposition in 1889.

Richards was a member of the American Water Color Society and an honorary member of the National Academy of Design, where he exhibited from 1861 to 1899.  In 1883, the Corcoran Art Gallery in Washington, D.C. commissioned him to paint On the Coast of New Jersey.

His work is represented in the collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Brooklyn Museum, the Newark Museum, Fogg Art Museum of Harvard University, St. Louis Art Museum, the Adirondack Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Cooper-Hewitt Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Vassar College Art Gallery, Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Richards died in Newport, Rhode Island in 1905. The artist was honored with a retrospective exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1973.  He has been accorded a central position in the 19th century Luminist tradition of American Art.


Biography from Metropolitan Museum NY:
William Trost Richards was an artist associated with both the Hudson River School and the American Pre-Raphaelite movement.  Born in Philadelphia in 1833, Richards studied in Florence, Rome, and Paris before settling in Germantown, Pennsylvania.  He was recognized initially for his landscapes - especially of the White Mountains of northern New Hampshire and southwestern Maine - but turned his attention to the sea beginning in about 1867.

A leading artist of the American Watercolor Society, Richards was esteemed for helping lift the medium into higher prominence.  The exhibition at the Metropolitan features works representing the entire range of subjects for which Richards was known.  Noteworthy among his early works is Palms, a delicate drawing from 1855, which was acquired recently by the Museum.

Landscapes from the E. L. Magoon gift of 1880 includes the watercolors Moonlight on Mount Lafayette, New Hampshire (1873) and Lake Squam from Red Hill (1874).  Among Richards's luminous and highly realistic paintings of the sea is the watercolor A Rocky Coast (1877).



Biography from AskART:
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.

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.

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.

Watercolor was best for plein air sketching and was excellent for expressing the atmospheric effects he sought to achieve. Two patrons of his watercolor painting were Elias L. Magoon and George Whitney, and their support allowed him to work without the worry of money.


Source:
Matthew Baigell, Dictionary of American Art

** If you discover credit omissions or have additional information to add, please let us know at registrar@AskART.com.


William Richards is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
Hudson River School Painters
San Francisco Panama-Pacific Exhibition 1915
Paris Pre 1900



Explore Other Interesting Artists:
Albert Bierstadt
David Johnson
Worthington Whittredge
John Singer Sargent
Thomas Moran
William Merritt Chase
William Hart
Mary Cassatt
John Murphy
Winslow Homer
William Glackens
Thomas Hill
William Brown
Robert Wood
William Bradford
Frederic Remington
Marsden Hartley
Ernest Lawson
John Brown
Thomas Cole
John Sloan
Edward Hopper
Thomas Hart Benton
Maurice Prendergast
William Walker
Alexander Calder
Arthur Davies
Norman Rockwell
William Stevens
James Tyler
Georgia O'Keeffe
Richard Miller
John Williamson
Maxfield Parrish
William Leigh
Rockwell Kent
Harrison Brown
Edward Henry
Hugh Jones
Robert Reid
William Keith
William Paxton
Charles Davis
Charles Russell
Russell Smith
Jack Smith
Thomas Sully
John Carlson
George Brown
Henry Smith



See Artists Appearing in the Same Auctions:
John Brown
Albert Bierstadt
Ernest Lawson
Norman Rockwell
Thomas Hart Benton
Frederic Remington
Thomas Moran
Grandma Moses
William Merritt Chase
David Johnson
John Murphy
Arthur Davies
John Singer Sargent
Andrew Wyeth
John Sloan
Max Weber
Worthington Whittredge
William Walker
William Hart
Daniel Knight
Edward Henry
William Stevens
Hugh Jones
William Bradford
James Hart
Henry Smith
Richard Miller
Marsden Hartley
James Tyler
Mary Cassatt
Rockwell Kent
Jonas Lie
Charles Russell
Winslow Homer
William Paxton
Maxfield Parrish
William Leigh
Theodore Robinson
Thomas Sully
Francis Smith
Edward Hopper
William Miller
William Brown
William Horton
Harry Jackson
Thomas Hill
John Carlson
Robert Wood
William Post
Georgia O'Keeffe

go to tophome | site map | site terms | AskART services & subscriptions
copyright © 2000-2008 AskART all rights reserved ® AskART is a registered trademark.

artists by name:  a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

frequently searched artists 1, 2, more...
art appraisals, art for sale, auction records, misc artists