William Trost Richards: True to Nature

William Trost Richards (1833–1905) began his career as an artist of the Hudson River School. His meticulous studies of plants growing along the Hudson together with his drawings and watercolours of the Adirondacks, the Catskills and his native Pennsylvania reveal a sensibility devoted to the close observation of nature. Influenced by the writings of John Ruskin and shaped by the poetry of William Wordsworth, Richards rendered the natural world – rocks, trees, flowers and meadows – with both scientific accuracy and artistic composure.

In the 1870s, when grand-scale landscape painting was going out of fashion, Richards turned to the watercolour medium and marine subjects. Acclaimed at exhibitions of the American Watercolor Society, dozens of the luminous scenes of surf rolling on the New England coast are reproduced in the catalogue. Other watercolours portray rough seas beating against the rocks of Cornwall near the mythic castle of King Arthur at Tintagel, a site much favoured by the artist. In the last decade of his life, however, Richards began making small oil sketches, using this medium to record a trip to Norway in 1901. The craggy heights of the Lofoten and Vesteralen Islands in the Arctic Circle reflect
Richards’s love of mountain scenery.

This book celebrates the life and work of William Trost Richards with reproductions of 230 works in pencil, watercolour, charcoal and oil, and an essay by Carol M. Osborne, the curator at the time the works were given to what is now Stanford University’s Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, which places these works in the context of his life. It is a testament to a romantic realist who remained true to nature long after the epochal changes of the turn of the century.

Carol M. Osborne was associate director and chief curator of the Stanford University Museum of Art (now the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts) from 1978 to 1993. Her doctoral thesis Pierre Didot the Elder and French Book Illustration, 1789-1820 was published by Garland in 1986. Among her other publications are books and articles on the Stanfords as art collectors, the Cantor Center’s drawing collection and American artists abroad in the late nineteenth century. Her catalogue Venetian Glass of the 1890s: Salviati at Stanford University was also published by Philip Wilson in 2002.