The National Academy presents over 60 works by William Trost Richards (1833-1905), one of the finest landscape and marine painters of the 19th century. Richards was associated with both the Hudson River School and the American Pre-Raphaelite movement and became a member of the Academy in 1871. The exhibition will feature groups of oils, watercolors and works on paper from the Academy’s rich collection, which consists of over 100 works of art bequeathed to the Academy by the estate of Richards’ daughter, Anna Richards Brewster, in 1954. Also shown are four paintings borrowed from private collections and Anna Richard’s 1892 portrait of her father by the artist. The majority of the exhibited works have not yet been on public view. William Trost Richards:Visions of Land and Sea will be on view May 23 – September 8, 2013.

Senior Curator Bruce Weber remarks that “This exhibition offers the Academy the opportunity to highlight for the first time the full breadth of the stunning group of work by Richards given by the artist’s daughter, and reveal his unique vision and mastery of his craft, which has served to place him in the forefront of American landscape painters of past centuries.”

Born in Philadelphia in 1833, William Trost Richards studied intermittently with the German-born landscape painter Paul Weber, and greatly admired the landscapes of Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church. In the 1860s, he came under the influence of the British writer and aesthetician John Ruskin, and the English Pre-Raphaelites. During this decade he began working in watercolor, and his enthusiasm for the medium blossomed in the 1870s when he began to devote his primary attention to marine painting, emerging as a rising interpreter of coastal and marine subjects.

Highlights of the exhibition include a large group of graphite drawings of wayside plants that Richards created over the course of the late 1850s and 1860s. He was encouraged by the writings of John Ruskin to paint and draw directly from nature, reproducing in great detail exactly what he observed. Richard’s close-up, ground level views of growing plant life are rendered in an almost miniaturist technique, and are marvels of careful study. The artist created these drawings in the course of his various travels, including during his excursions to the Adirondacks and the Catskills of New York State, and in the vicinity of his home in Germantown, Pennsylvania.

With the turn of his primary interest to marine painting in the 1870s Richards began to regularly work in watercolor, which he found particularly suited to capturing effects of lights and color at the shore. The medium served him for independent efforts, as well as for plein air studies for works in oil. His watercolors were regularly featured in the annual exhibitions of the Society of American Water Colors, where they were greeted with critical fanfare for their masterful rendering of coastal topography, and the most subtle effects of light and atmosphere.

His Marine with Yachts was probably based on sketches made in the late 1860s along the New Jersey coast, and bears the hallmarks of the Luminist aesthetic of the period in its clarity of light, infinite sense of space, spare design, low horizon, and lateral format.

During the course of his stay in England in the summer of 1878 Richards was especially drawn to the ruins he discovered at Tintagel Castle on the coast of Cornwall with its Arthurian associations. He created at least ten watercolors and five oils of the subject. In addition to conveying his fascination with the legend of King Arthur, this picture offers a sense of Richards’ personal exhilaration when encountering the area’s rugged and dramatic topography with its distinctive and complex rock formations, which are open to the full force of the sea.

In preparation for this exhibition a significant group of oils and works on paper from the museum’s holdings were conserved with the support of grants from The Conservation Treatment Grant Program of Greater Hudson Heritage Network,and the Sherman-Fairchild Foundation.

NATIONAL ACADEMY M– USEUM
1083 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street
New York, NY 10128
212-369-4880
www.nationalacademy.org

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