William Trost Richards

(American, 1833–1905)

William Trost Richards was an American landscape painter known for his precise depictions of forests, coasts, and mountains. Affiliated with both the Hudson River School painters like Frederic Edwin Church and Pre-Raphaelite painters such as John Everett Millais, Richard merged aesthetic qualities from both movements. Late in his career, Richards painted almost exclusively scenes of the New England and New Jersey coasts, as seen in one of his most famous works Along the Shore (1905). Born on June 3, 1833 in Philadelphia, PA, Richards studied at the Pennsylvania Academy, later becoming a member of the Association of the Advancement of Truth in Art, an American-based Pre-Raphaelite group. His first group exhibition was organized by the artist Albert Bierstadt in 1858 in New Bedford, MA. Richards died on November 8, 1905, in Newport, RI. The artist’s works are in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.