New York, NY (May 14, 2013) - The National Academy presents over 60 works by William Trost Richards (1833-1905), one of the finest landscape and marine painters of the 19th century. Richards was associated with both the Hudson River School and the American Pre-Raphaelite movement and became a member of the Academy in 1871. The exhibition will feature groups of oils, watercolors and works on paper from the Academy's rich collection, which consists of over 100 works of art bequeathed to the Academy by the estate of Richards' daughter, Anna Richards Brewster, in 1954. Also shown are four paintings borrowed from private collections and Anna Richard's 1892 portrait of her father by the artist. The majority of the exhibited works have not yet been on public view. William Trost Richards:Visions of Land and Sea will be on view May 23 - September 8, 2013.
Senior Curator Bruce Weber remarks that "This exhibition offers the Academy the opportunity to highlight for the first time the full breadth of the stunning group of work by Richards given by the artist's daughter, and reveal his unique vision and mastery of his craft, which has served to place him in the forefront of American landscape painters of past centuries."
Born in Philadelphia in 1833, William Trost Richards studied intermittently with the German-born landscape painter Paul Weber, and greatly admired the landscapes of Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church. In the 1860s, he came under the influence of the British writer and aesthetician John Ruskin, and the English Pre-Raphaelites. During this decade he began working in watercolor, and his enthusiasm for the medium blossomed in the 1870s when he began to devote his primary attention to marine painting, emerging as a rising interpreter of coastal and marine subjects.
Highlights of the exhibition include a large group of graphite drawings of wayside plants that Richards created over the course of the late 1850s and 1860s. He was encouraged by the writings of John Ruskin to paint and draw directly from nature, reproducing in great detail exactly what he observed. Richard's close-up, ground level views of growing plant life are rendered in an almost miniaturist technique, and are marvels of careful study. The artist created these drawings in the course of his various travels, including during his excursions to the Adirondacks and the Catskills of New York State, and in the vicinity of his home in Germantown, Pennsylvania.
With the turn of his primary interest to marine painting in the 1870s Richards began to regularly work in watercolor, which he found particularly suited to capturing effects of lights and color at the shore. The medium served him for independent efforts, as well as for plein air studies for works in oil. His watercolors were regularly featured in the annual exhibitions of the Society of American Water Colors, where they were greeted with critical fanfare for their masterful rendering of coastal topography, and the most subtle effects of light and atmosphere.
His Marine with Yachts was probably based on sketches made in the late 1860s along the New Jersey coast, and bears the hallmarks of the Luminist aesthetic of the period in its clarity of light, infinite sense of space, spare design, low horizon, and lateral format.
During the course of his stay in England in the summer of 1878 Richards was especially drawn to the ruins he discovered at Tintagel Castle on the coast of Cornwall with its Arthurian associations. He created at least ten watercolors and five oils of the subject. In addition to conveying his fascination with the legend of King Arthur, this picture offers a sense of Richards' personal exhilaration when encountering the area's rugged and dramatic topography with its distinctive and complex rock formations, which are open to the full force of the sea.
In preparation for this exhibition a significant group of oils and works on paper from the museum's holdings were conserved with the support of grants from The Conservation Treatment Grant Program of Greater Hudson Heritage Network,and the Sherman-Fairchild Foundation.
PUBLIC PROGRAMS:
Wednesday, June 5, 2013, 6:30 - 8 PM
William Trost Richards: The History of a Reputation
with Linda S. Ferber, Senior Art Historian and Vice President of the New York Historical Society
Friday, July 12, 2013, 3 - 4 PM
Curator Insights: William Trost Richards
with Senior Curator Bruce Weber
CONCURRENT EXHIBITIONS:
JEFFREY GIBSON: SAID THE PIGEON TO THE SQUIRREL
Jeffrey Gibson, the first artist of the National Academy's Emerging Artist Spotlight series, creates geometric abstract paintings and sculpture that draw on both Native American and modernist influences, from nineteenth-century Iroquois beadwork to 1990's club culture. In Gibson's work, everyday things--mirrors, punching bags, ironing boards--are transformed into objects of unique expression. Highlights of the exhibition will be a 20-foot travois consisting of two tipi poles as well as Gibson's signature collaged, painted, and beaded punching bags, a new series of hand-held and tabletop antique mirrors covered with painted hide, and hide-covered colored fluorescent lights that bring together the formal simplicity of the late modernist Dan Flavin with Gibson's traditional Native heraldic designs.
VISUALIZING TIME: NARRATIVE PRINTS FROM THE NATIONAL ACADEMY MUSEUM Selected by Andrew Raftery, NA
Showcasing a selection of narrative prints from the Academy's collection, artist Andrew Raftery examines tactics for visual storytelling, finding unexpected links between artists across many periods. Visualizing Time focuses on how printmakers structured the representation of time as they created narratives that were comprehensible to their original audiences and compelling today.
Andrew Raftery is a printmaker specializing in narrative scenes of contemporary American life. Trained in painting and printmaking at Boston University and Yale, he has focused on burin engraving for the past 12 years. In 2003 Raftery received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, and in 2008 he was a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He was elected to membership in the National Academy in 2009, and is a Professor of Printmaking at Rhode Island School of Design.
FUNDERS
The National Academy thanks Questroyal Fine Art, LLC, New York, NY for its support of William Trost Richards: Visions of Land and Sea. The National Academy is grateful to the following for their generous support of our operations: The Bodman Foundation, The Bonnie Cashin Fund, in honor of Henry W. Grady, the F. Donald Kenney Exhibition Fund, The Estate of Geoffrey Wagner in memory of Colleen Browning, NA, and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
THE NATIONAL ACADEMY
The National Academy is one of the country's oldest art organizations, founded in 1825 by artists Samuel F. B. Morse, Thomas Cole, and Asher B. Durand as a place to exhibit and teach art. Each year, artists and architects are named by their peers as National Academicians. The 2012 class includes Siah Armajani, Wendy Evans Joseph, Jeanne Gang, Robert Gober, Michaels Graves, Bruce Nauman, Joel Shapiro, Cindy Sherman, Richard Tuttle, and Bill Viola.
The Museum includes over 7,000 works from artist members, representing three centuries of new ideas and new approaches to American Art. Newly enhanced galleries showcase permanent and temporary exhibitions. The National Academy is located on Museum Mile in the former Huntington Mansion, between the Cooper-Hewitt and Guggenheim Museums.
The National Academy School has included Winslow Homer, George Inness, Arshile Gorky, and Willem de Kooning as students, but also welcomes beginning and intermediate artists of all ages into its studios. Classes taught by well-respected artists include drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture, and mixed media. Frequent exhibitions allow for display of student work.
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Photo caption: William Trost Richards, Coastal Scene, 1862, Oil on cardboard, Bequest of James A. Suydam, 1865
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