(1833-1905) Richards was born in Philadelphia, the son of Quaker parents. His formal academic education ended in 1847 following his father's death, when he worked as a designer of chandeliers and gas fixtures to help support his family. From 1850 to 1858 he was an illustrator for a lamp-manufacturing firm. He studied drawing with William Stanley Haseltine and Paul Weber. Richards married writer Anna Matlack in 1856 and settled in German-town, Pennsylvania until 1881. He admired the aesthetic theories of John Ruskin, and followed the writer's dictum of "selecting nothing and rejecting nothing," striving to record the minutest detail of nature in his work. Richards traveled widely and was often accompanied on painting trips by his daughter, painter Anna Richards (later Brewster). He settled permanently in Newport after 1890, becoming increasingly fascinated by the effects of light, atmosphere, and ocean. By the late 19th-century he was one of the best-known watercolorists in America.

Biography courtesy of Roger King Gallery of Fine Art, www.antiquesandfineart.com/rking

William Trost Richards combined in his works the grandeur, atmosphere and light of the American painter, the interest in the minutiae of nature of the pre-raphaelites, and the precision and technique of the Dusseldorf School. He was a landscape artist for much of his life and is most remembered for his coastal seascapes.

Born in Philadelphia in 1833, Richards began to draw when very young. Despite circumstances that forced him at age 13 to drop out of school and support his family by designing chandeliers and gas fixtures, he studied privately, along with William Stanley Haseltine, under German artist Paul Weber. He may also have attended classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

By 1853, Richards felt ready to devote all his time to art. He set out for Europe, probably in the company of his studio-mate, painter Alexander Lawrie, and Haseltine. Traveling through Florence, Rome and Paris, he encountered American artists Hiram Powers, Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze and Albert Bierstadt. He returned from Europe in 1856 with high regard for the uplifting works of Native American landscape artists, such as John F. Kensett and Frederic Edwin Church.

In 1856, he married Anna Mattock and honeymooned and sketched at Niagara Falls. They later settled in Germantown, Pennsylvania, on the outskirts of Philadelphia. Richards devoted his attention from then through the Civil War to meticulous, naturalistic landscapes, many with literary themes. He was particularly influenced by an exhibition of the works of pre-Raphaelites painters in Philadelphia in 1858.

His paintings of this period are charming; they combine, oddly, an obsessive camera-like precision with grand atmospheric effects. He worked out-of-doors as much as possible, in Pennsylvania, the Adirondacks and the Catskills.

At the end of the Civil War, from 1866 to 1867, Richards traveled with his family in Europe. After that, he began to paint his masterful coastal seascapes, which ideally reconcile his love of sharp detail with the larger scale.

He began in the 1870s to spend the summers and paint in Newport, Rhode Island. He also traveled frequently to England for further subjects and rnarkets. In 1890, he moved permanently to Newport, where he died in 1905.

Memberships:
Forensic and Literary Circle of Philadelphia
National Academy Of Design

Public Collections:
Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine
Brooklyn Museum
Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Decorative Arts and Design, New York City
Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Newark Museum, New Jersey
University Of Washington, Seattle

Biography courtesy of Roughton Galleries, www.antiquesandfineart.com/roughton

William T. Richards was forced at the young age of 13 to drop out of school to help financially support his family. He worked as a design illustrator for a gas lamp company. However, Richards was able to return to his studies later and worked privately with Paul Weber in 1850. From 1853-56 he traveled through Florence, Rome and Paris with his mentor and friends Weber, Williams and Haseltine. When he returned to America he settled in Germantown and married. For many years Richards was preoccupied with literary themes in landscapes and painted true to nature with accurate detail that reveals the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites. After a brief visit to Britain, Richards became increasingly more interested in marine paintings, for which he is best known. In 1874 he bought one of several homes around the Newport area. He painted around the Aquidneck and Conanicut area until his death in 1905. Richards worked outdoors as much as possible and incorporated grandeur, light and atmosphere in all of his painting.

Biography courtesy of The Caldwell Gallery, www.antiquesandfineart.com/caldwell

Moving between landscapes and seascapes, oils and watercolors, rigorous precision and luminous fluidity, William Trost Richards embraced and mastered each phase of nineteenth-century painting. His extraordinary career began in Philadelphia, where he developed his exacting technique under the German artist Paul Weber and was active in a "Forensic and Literary Circle" devoted to the study of poetry and prose. Linda Ferber, the acknowledged authority on Richards, claims that his "early perceptions of nature were largely shaped by his activities as a litterateur" who cultivated "a Wordsworthian reverence toward nature." Thus, the foundations of Richards's work -a firm grounding in the nature of technique and a poetic love of nature's technicalities -were established at the very beginning of his career.

As Richards's landscapes began to attract public notice, he drew the admiration of the American Pre-Raphaelites, who elected him to their Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art in 1863. In his Book of the Artists, Henry Tuckerman praised Richards's literalist, hyperclear woodlands as "miracles of special study" that qualified him as the "most remarkable" of the Ruskinian Pre-Raphaelites. Yet Tuckerman was a bit late in his assessment: in 1867, the year that Book of the Artists was published, Richards had already shifted his focus to marine painting. Legend has it that the artist was so moved by his seaward journey home from Europe that he changed his artistic course on the spot. The rest of his oeuvre was dedicated to the study of the sea, featuring panoramic coastal scenes and luminous seascapes. By 1873, Richards was regarded among "the best-known watercolor painters of America" -with his fluid handling of the medium effortlessly evoking the liquidity of the sea.

Richards won bronze medals from the Centennial Exposition of 1876 and the Paris Exposition of 1889, as well as a gold medal from the Pennsylvania Academy Centennial of 1905. The Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts mounted a major retrospective of his landscapes and seascapes in 1973. His paintings are also in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection in Madrid.

Biography courtesy of Questroyal Fine Art, LLC, www.antiquesandfineart.com/questroyal