William Trost Richards
1833 - 1905
A native of Philadelphia , William Trost Richards studied art in the 1850s with German painter Paul Weber, but the painter who most influenced his early work was Thomas Cole. In 1854, Richards opened his first studio and also became a member of Hudson River School circles, becoming friendly with Frederic Church and Jasper Cropsey as well as other members. Within the next two years, he traveled to Europe , studying the art there and eventually becoming interested in the work of the Pre-Raphaelites.
By 1870, however, Richards had become interested in the style that was later to be known as luminism. One of the distinctions between the work of the luminists and that of the Hudson River School was the actual size of the paintings. The Hudson River paintings reflected the immensity of their subjects in the size of their canvases; the luminists suggested sublimity through scale, not size. A clear example of this type of work is Richards' “On the Cornish Coast” with its horizontal planes and diagonal bands of coastline. While Frederic Church's “The Heart of the Andes”, considered a masterpiece of the Hudson River School, is a majestic 66” by 119”, “On the Cornish Coast” is on a standard 10” by 18” canvas.
The concentration on water and sky as windows on the soul is the reason why the predominant form of landscape among the luminists was the seascape. In one sense, it is the only place they, as the last vestige of transcendentalism, could go. The frontier was rapidly closing; there were no more undiscovered areas of America . So, for the luminists, in the words of critic Robert Hughes, “the sea's immense inviolability makes up for the loss of wilderness on land.” These seascapes are not the pounding waves and terrible tempests associated with painters like Winslow Homer; they are still, reflective waters, their horizon line a mere shading in tone between sea and sky and possessed of a sort of hushed light, glowing from within the painting.
Richards continued to work in this mode for the rest of his life, specializing in watercolors at a time when most artists devoted themselves to oil paintings, a preference that would eventually be echoed, as would his choice of subject, in the works of Homer. Befitting his love of the sea, he spent the last years of his life in Newport , Rhode Island where he died in 1905.
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