William Trost Richards

Rhode Island Coast

c. 1874

William Trost Richards was born in Philadelphia on November 14, 1833. He studied in Philadelphia with Paul Weber in 1850 and possibly at the PAFA, CA, 1852, before studying in Florence, Rome and Paris from 1853–56. 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 affects the sea and shore. He died in Newport, Rhode Island, on November 9, 1905.