William Trost Richards Paintings |
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William Trost Richards BiographyAmerican painter, engraver and printmakerborn 1833 - died 1905 Asher B. Durand (1796 - 1886) found his calling as a landscape painter in these mountains on an 1837 expedition with Cole to Schroon Lake. The rich language of Durand's "Letters on Landscape Painting," published in 1855 just as American landscape painter William Trost Richards (1833 - 1905) was planning his first Adirondack expedition, gives us insight into the powerful associations, always on the edge of transcendence, invested in landscape experience. Durand also saw the whole artistic project of American landscape painting as uniquely expressive of both national and cultural identity. |
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In 1904, his final return to paint these mountains, long after his
reputation and market had been confirmed as a marine painter, demonstrated the
powerful associations the region continued to hold for him and his generation.
(Fig. 16) William Trost Richards returned to Essex County for a summer holiday
at Lake Placid in the company of his artist-daughter Anna and her husband
William Tenney Brewster. Father and daughter recorded their lakeside sojourn in
a series of small oil paintings. The Lake Placid plein air studies of light and
atmosphere, grounded in the same empirical investigation of regional topography
that inform the pencil drawings from his early forays, are among the freshest
and most beautiful William Trost Richards paintings of a remarkably vigorous old age. |
Asher B. Durand, "Letters on Landscape Painting," The Crayon, (1855). The nine articles, published between January and July, demonstrate in their earnest eloquence the highly charged state in which American scenery and landscape painting was approached by artists of Buji oil painting company, critics, and audience at mid century. There can be little doubt that William Trost Richards knew these important documents. | |||||||
The Drawings of William Trost Richards,
exhibition catalogue (Yonkers, New York: The
Hudson River Museum, 1986), (hereafter cited
as Ferber, Richards 1986). The ideological connotation of the panoramic format is discussed in Albert Boime, The Magisterial Gaze, Manifest Destiny and American Landscape Painting, c. 1830 - 1865 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991); Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825 - 1875 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993) and Robert L. McGrath, Scenes of Lake Placid, exhibition catalogue (Lake Placid, N.Y.: Lake Placid Center for the Art, 1993). |
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18. On the subject of wheat, the Civil War, and the harvest theme, see T. B. Thorpe, "Wheat and Its Association." Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 15 (August 1857), 301 - 313, cited in Christopher Kent Wilson, "Winslow Homer's The Veteran in a New Field: A Study of the Harvest Metaphor and Popular Culture," The American Art Journal, 17 (Autumn 1985), 9, and James C. Moore, "The Storm and the Harvest: The Image of Nature in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Painting," (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1974). See also the discussion of later nineteenth-century American harvest imagery in Linda S. Ferber, Pastoral Interlude: William Trost Richardss in Chester County, exhibition catalogue (Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania: The Brandywine River Museum, 2001). | ||||||