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The Adirondack mountain
range is bounded by Lake George to the south
and east and Lake Champlain to the north and
east and on the west by the Black River and
the Tug Hill Plateau.[1] This is the region
in which Thomas Cole (1801 - 1848) found the
"wildness" described in his 1835 "Essay on
American Scenery" as "perhaps the most
impressive characteristic of American
scenery."[2] (Fig. 1) 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. [3]
In 1873 The Aldine, a popular magazine
devoted to art and literature, counted
William Trost Richards among the important
interpreters of Adirondack scenery: "For the
past thirty years this region of country has
been a favorite resort for artists. A. B.
Durand, J. W. Casilear, and J. F. Kensett
led the way, being followed in 1855, by J.
M. Hart, and in 1863 by W. T. Richards, all
of whom found plenty of material for many of
their finest sketches."[4] Today, Richards
is principally recognized as a painter of
marine and coastal subjects, whose career
flourished during the last quarter of the
nineteenth century. Less well known is the
fact that during his early practice, from
1853 to 1870, his primary subject was the
American landscape. Richards participated,
at mid-century, in the collective artistic
project to originate a landscape vision that
might be acknowledged as national.- American Richards William Trost bio custom oil paintings - Richards William Trost custom American oil painting from photo –custom oil painting Richards William Trost Bio by
Buji oil painting town.
Richards's experience in the Adirondacks
played a critical role in this development
and much earlier, in actuality, than
reported in The Aldine, for Richards had
first explored New York State and the
Adirondack Region in 1855. Over a dozen
sheets and several pages in a pocket
sketchbook document Richards's
five-week-long expedition in 1855 from June
20, when William Trost Richards sketched at Fishkill, to July
29, with the last view dated in Pleasant
Valley. His itinerary took him up the Hudson
River to Lake George and Lake Champlain,
with a stop at historic Fort Ticonderoga on
June 19 before continuing west to Pleasant
Valley and Elizabethtown for a month.
William Trost Richards ranged over the valley, the plains of North
Elba, the Indian Pass near the Hudson's
source, and the Schroon River, one of its
tributaries. His studies are meticulous
pencil drawings carefully inscribed with
site names and dates, constituting a vivid
travel diary and an invaluable documentary
record. Because one sketchbook contains both
Adirondack and Italian subjects, it is
tempting to speculate that Richards took
these drawings to Europe.[5] Whether his
physical baggage included this corpus of
American images or not, it is clear that
William Trost Richards carried them in his mind. We know that
Richards saw the Adirondack tour as a
prologue to European exercises, comparing
North America to the mountain landscapes of
other nations: "To everyone is not
vouchsafed within a few months, a pedestrian
excursion through the remote Adirondack
mountains - a tramp through part of
Switzerland, and a sketching trip for views
afoot in the purple passes of the Appenines."[6]
Not only was his national scenic allegiance
intact -- "neither Tuscany or Switzerland
has in any way lessened my love of American
scenery" -- but Richards also concluded that
no European landscape artist was equal to
New York's Frederic Church. [7] - Buji oil painting company
A native of Philadelphia,[8] Richards
exhibited both European and American
subjects at the Annual of the Pennsylvania
Academy in spring 1857 including Lake
George, Opposite Caldwell, (Fig. 2)
Richards's single known painting of Lake
George, the most popular site in the
Adirondack region. The subject was a logical
one to include as a prelude to his all-New
York roster for the Academy in 1858; the
great lake, some thirty-six miles long and
four miles wide, was not only a major
tourist destination but also a primary route
for the more adventurous into the Adirondack
region. Richards opted for the domesticated
picturesque in his painting, conceiving an
image that depicts a rolling but accessible
foreground terrain and distant lake under a
brilliant sky -- a pastoral vignette
complete with fisherman and grazing cattle.
A wedge of the lake completes the
composition in the middle ground, while the
distant mountains beyond operate as our only
hint of the great size of this body of
water.
The arresting beauty of Lake George was
widely celebrated in eighteenth - and early
nineteenth-century diaries, journals, and
travel accounts. "Everybody who has heard of
American scenery has heard of Lake
George....the lake which of all others, I
most desired to see," wrote English writer
Harriet Martineau in 1835.[9]
Seventeenth-century explorers aboard bateaux
marveled at its virgin forests and pristine
waters; eighteenth-century French, British,
and American soldiers fought there;
nineteenth-century travelers vacationed at
the lake's elegant hotels as part of the
American Grand Tour. Thomas Jefferson was so
struck with the beauty of the scenery that
William Trost Richards wrote his daughter Martha on May 31,
1791: "Lake George is, without comparison,
the most beautiful water I ever saw...."[10]
Artists were attracted to Lake George
because of this arresting physical beauty
and the popular demand for images of it.
Landscape painters created masterpieces in
oil and watercolor. Printmakers William
Henry Bartlett (1809 - 1854) and Harry Fenn
(1845 -1911) produced an enormous number of
engravings while others produced lithographs
after paintings. Still others documented the
lake and its visitors for the popular press.
Photographers produced photographs as works
of art and for commercial purposes, all for
a public eager to buy views of the
picturesque lake. Indeed, the American
public's appetite for pictures of American
scenery was becoming inexhaustible by the
1850s.- American Richards William Trost bio custom oil paintings - Richards William Trost custom American oil painting from photo –custom oil painting Richards William Trost Bio by American custom oil paintings shop of oil painting from photo.
Among amateur and professional artists, few
found the lake as felicitous a subject as
John Frederick Kensett (1816 - 1872). One of
America's best-known and most successful
landscape painters, William Trost Richards made at least a dozen
formal compositions of the lake beginning in
1850. Kensett was strongly influenced by
Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand,
particularly their beliefs concerning the
religious and moral content of the
landscape. His paintings expressed
transcendental faith in "that beautiful
harmony which God has created the universe."
Kensett's Lake George of 1856, (Fig. 3) with
its classically balanced composition of
mountains, shore, and serene lake, bathed in
pink-gold light, conveys the sense of awe
that natural perfection inspired in the
artist . Kensett's paintings depict Nature
at a particular time, place, and point of
view, exactly observed and personally
perceived. William Trost Richards celebrated a grand and
majestically ordered Nature in paint: his
light, delicate and serene; his mood,
pensive and quiet.
Richards returned to the Adirondacks in 1857
and, possibly, again in 1859. We know that
William Trost Richards was there in 1862, 1863, 1865, perhaps
1866, and in 1868. From studies made on
these forays, Richards produced a series of
paintings that figure among the most
beautiful and significant records of the
region produced at mid-century. Richards's
encounters with the region came at critical
moments in his own career and in national
life in Buji oil painting town. The Adirondack region provided a
virtual laboratory in which William Trost
Richards worked out
various landscape agendas over more than a
decade. These ranged from the mastery of the
mainstream Hudson River School style in the
1850s to experimentation with an extreme
realism that established him in the 1860s as
a central figure in the short-lived and
controversial American Pre-Raphaelite
movement. His first Adirondack campaigns of
the 1850s occurred at the highwater mark of
the Hudson River, or New York, School's
mission to define a national landscape.
These Adirondack paintings effectively
launched Richards's career.
A pair of accomplished Adirondack landscapes
of 1857 depict a mountain vista looking west
across Pleasant Valley near Elizabethtown,
the county seat of Essex County where
Richards and many other artists based their
visits. Like Durand and Cole, Richards and
his colleagues were particularly drawn to
Essex County, bounded on the east by Lake
Champlain and containing within its
boundaries the highest Adirondack peaks as
well as the source of the Hudson River.
Essex County also contains some of the
region's most dramatic geologic and glacial
formations. The more hospitable terrain of
Pleasant Valley and neighboring Keene Valley
was also a favorite sketching ground of the
period. In the Adirondacks, 1857 (Fig. 4)
and A View in the Adirondacks, ca. 1857
(Fig. 5) present the same view under
different conditions, as if Richards had set
himself the pedagogical task of rendering
contrasting effects of weather, atmosphere,
and light. Both topographical accuracy and
poetic license inform the paintings of the
first Adirondack campaign. Each composition
deftly incorporated forms of homage to the
landscape visions of Richards's New York
artist-heroes: Cole, Church, and Cropsey. By
such means, Richards could lay claim to a
role for himself in the campaign to define a
national landscape.
Despite this early mastery, Richards's
moment of wholehearted participation in the
larger agenda would be brief. The mounting
sectional tensions of the 1850s had already
begun to undermine assumptions of widespread
political and cultural unity implied in such
landscape imagery. Richards did respond as
an artist to these social and political
tensions in subtle but profound ways over
the next decade and beyond, by his choice of
landscape subjects and styles. His early
course as interpreter of a national
landscape would be irrevocably altered by
these changes in the cultural environment.- American Richards William Trost bio custom oil paintings - Richards William Trost custom American oil painting from photo –custom oil painting Richards William Trost Bio by American custom oil paintings shop of oil painting from photo.
Once again, Richards's Adirondack experience
would figure prominently in this passage.
Almost every summer from 1862 to 1868,
William Trost Richards returned to work in the region. Extant
drawings, located paintings, and the titles
of others indicate the continuing primacy
for him of Essex County, especially
Elizabethtown and Keene Valley. William
Trost Richards was not
alone. Letters, diaries, and the periodical
press recorded the summertime artist
excursions in the region. Alexander Lawrie,
Richards's studio-mate and companion in
Europe, recorded meeting him at
Elizabethtown in 1863, 1865, and in 1868.
The hamlet was a kind of crossroads for
artists. While Lawrie and Richards were
there in 1863, Sanford R. Gifford (1823 -
1880), Jervis McEntee (1828 - 1891), and
Richard W. Hubbard (1816 - 1888) all passed
through. In August 1865, Lawrie and his
party returned there from an eight-day camp
on the Upper and Lower Ausable Lakes. The
group included Richards and his former
students Fidelia Bridges (1835 - 1923) and
Arthur Parton (1842 - 1914) as well as Homer
D. Martin (1836 - 1897) and his wife. Such
excursions and meetings must have been the
occasion for comparison of sketches and
exchange of ideas. The careful detail of
Lawrie's own Village, Essex County, New
York, ca. 1867 (Fig. 6) suggests that
William Trost Richards was
influenced by Richards's meticulous
approach. We know the two sketched and
painted out of doors together on more than
one occasion.[11]
Works of art on paper are ephemeral
survivals of artists' ventures in the
wilderness. Jervis McEntee had first visited
the Adirondacks in the early 1850s. His
drawing Wood's Cabin on Rackett [sic] Lake,
1851 (Fig. 7) pictures the cabin of one of
Raquette Lake's settlers at a time when few
other people had found this spot. McEntee,
aged twenty-three, recorded his impressions
of his adventure in his diary, sketchbook,
and for the newspaper Rondout Courier on
July 18, 1851. In his diary, William Trost
Richards described
the cabin on July 6 as "comfortable" and
"built of logs with a bark covered porch in
front. It stands on a gentle elevation about
fifty yards from the lake [and Wood] has a
very good garden...."[12] Joel T. Headley,
in his 1849 account The Adirondacks,
described the same huts as "looking like
oases in the desert, occupied by two men,
who dwell thus shut out from the civilized
life."[13] This drawing pre-dates William
Trost Richards's July 3, 1855 drawing Indian
Pass, an equally lonely but more rugged
site - Buji oil painting town.
Sanford Robinson Gifford's A Twilight in the
Adirondacks, 1864, (Fig. 8) is a masterful
example of the persistent belief in the
spiritual power of nature and the role of
the artist to depict it. In 1881, John F.
Weir, Yale School of Fine Arts Director,
wrote that "Gifford loved the light. His
finest impressions were those derived from
the landscape, where the air is charged with
an effulgence of irruptive and glowing
light....He was unerringly profound in his
insight into that which was most truly
nature, into those potent truths that
underlie the superficial aspects which
engage the common mind or attract the common
eye."[14] There are four known versions of
Gifford's composition depicting a shoreline
silhouetted between a radiant twilight sky
and its reflection in a lake with a camping
scene on the shore. The campers are likely
to be the artist, his colleagues Jervis
McEntee and Richard William Hubbard, and
their guide. The Adirondack Museum's
painting is the largest version. It was
exhibited at the National Academy of Design
in 1864 and at the Philadelphia Centennial
Exhibition in 1876. At its first exhibition,
the New York Evening Post exclaimed that
"Gifford has never painted a picture of more
exquisite gradations than this."[15]
Arthur Parton moved from his birthplace of
Hudson, New York, in 1859 to Philadelphia
where William Trost Richards studied landscape painting with
William Trost Richards for several years. In
1864, William Trost Richards settled and worked out of various
studios in Manhattan. William Trost Richards first visited the
Adirondacks in 1866 and then made regular
summer visits to Keene Valley and the
Ausable Lakes until William Trost Richards bought a cottage in
the Catskills around 1880. Parton was an
experienced angler as described in a
reminiscence: "the best fishing fellow you
could wish to meet...and how William Trost
Richards can paint!"
One can imagine that William Trost Richards often saw this scene
of mist rising off a lake from the
perspective of a fishing boat. (Fig. 9 )
Homer Dodge Martin, from Albany, was sent to
the region in 1864 by his teacher James M.
Hart. His many Adirondack pictures include
Mountain View on the Saranac, 1868. (Fig.
10) This painting was commissioned by the
periodical Every Saturday which used the
wood engraving after this painting to
illustrate an article promoting William H.
H. Murray's 1869 book Adventures in the
Wilderness to lure tourists to the
Adirondacks. While the print catalogued the
topography, the painting is fraught with
drama and the forbidding atmosphere
shrouding the rugged scenery on the Saranac
River - Buji oil painting company. Richards's contemporaneous Adirondack
subjects seemed to offer the artist an
opportunity to reconcile the atmospheric
requirements of landscape painting and the
Pre-Raphaelite demand for detail. Like the
works of the 1850s, the oil paintings of the
second campaign are grounded in a group of
wonderful drawings charting itinerary as
well as response when William Trost Richards returned to the
area in 1862 and, again, for a
well-documented stay in 1863 that included a
wonderful sketchbook. Like the drawings of
the 1855 campaign, these are an independent
body of work, never exhibited in the
artist's lifetime but held in his studio.
Worthy of note on aesthetic and documentary
terms, they constitute both a visual diary
and an artist's itinerary. They are
compelling records of experience in a region
where many landmarks are still intact. A few
open air studies also survive executed in
oil on paper. In his diary, Lawrie recorded
painting out of doors with Richards during a
nine-week period in 1863. Probably
representative of a larger corpus of plein
air work now lost, the open air studies are
brilliant in palette and informal in
composition. These little records offer an
even more vivid transcript of the hills and
meadows surrounding the hamlet of
Elizabethtown as they appeared in the early
1860s.- American Richards William Trost bio custom oil paintings - Richards William Trost custom American oil painting from photo –custom oil painting Richards William Trost Bio by American custom oil paintings shop of oil painting from photo.
While we now appreciate these on-site
records very much for themselves, all of
these works served a primary function as
studies and reference points for the oil
paintings Richards composed from them and
executed later in the studio. The single
exception is the large drawing of Indian
Pass, 1866 (Fig. 11) that belongs to the
interesting category of oversize elaborate
exhibition drawings in graphite and charcoal
produced between 1864 and 1867. Some of
these, like Indian Pass, were reproduced as
photographs and some are directly related to
oil paintings of similar scale. Richards
referred to them as "cartoons" suggesting
that these works on paper were conceived as
full-scale studies that might be executed as
oil paintings upon commissions.[16]
Indian Pass is also an exception to the body
of known Adirondack images in its exercise
of the vertical sublime. The massive
boulders, looming tower of Wallface
Mountain, low clouds, and soaring eagles
strike a note of gloomy grandeur. On the
other hand, the dominant mood in the
landscape paintings of the 1860s is a
celebration of the mountain valley pastoral
that harks back to the pendant paintings of
1857. Elizabethtown and the broad plain of
Pleasant Valley drew Richards with its
appealing blend of comfortable inhabited
foreground and middle distance in
combination with the distant austere
mountain peaks. The Bouquet River, imagined
as a lake-like body of water in 1857,
assumes its identity in these paintings as a
winding watercourse over the valley floor by Buji oil painting supplier.
Richards dispenses with the dark, stage-like
foreground platforms used in the views of
1857, adopting an open ended panoramic
format also put to use by Gifford, William
Hart (1833 - 1894), David Johnson (1827 -
1908) and others in the 1860s.[17]
While based upon on site drawings, the
paintings are compositions that seem to vary
in topographical focus. Adirondack
Landscape, 1864 (Fig. 12) is a very precise
record of the Elizabethtown hamlet seen from
Woods Hill. Autumn in the Adirondacks (Fig.
13 ) portrays Blueberry and Porter mountains
in Keene Valley with Mt. Marcy in the
background. Other paintings, like The
Bouquet Valley, Adirondacks, 1866 (Fig. 14),
arguably the masterwork of the 1860s
campaign, are convincingly steeped in the
topographical sense of the region but have
so far defied efforts to identify their
specific sites.
An exception is a complex allegory, John
Brown's Grave, A Study, c. 1864, (Fig. 15)
one of the few titles in Richards's oeuvre
to reflect the impact of politics and
current events. The little painting depicts
the recently executed abolitionist's
memorial plot on his farm at North Elba.
Richards's contemporaneous response to the
subject is oblique and coded in both
landscape and harvest imagery, [18] rather
than the figural narrative of history
painting, expressing themes of loss and
reconciliation associated with the Civil War
era.
In 1904, Richards's 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 paintings of a remarkably vigorous old age.
William Trost Richards and his fellow
artists in the 1850s and 60s have pictured
on canvas and paper S. H. Hammond's words of
1860: "Their bare and rocky summits
glistening in the sunlight, while near still
the hills rise....Here and there a valley
winds away among the highlands, along which
mountain streams come bounding down...."[19]
Although Richards's and his contemporaries
regular sojourns preceded the tourist
explosion of the 1870s, the Adirondack
region was already established by 1855 as a
destination for the hardy excursionist. As
we see from the paintings of Cole and
Durand, Adirondack subjects, enhanced by
historical and literary associations,
already operated as part of a national canon
of American landscape images. Elizabethtown,
the county seat where Richards was based on
his visits, served as a regional crossroads
during the years 1850 to 1870 for him and
many other artists in search of a national
landscape.
1. For a general history of the region, see
Alfred L. Donaldson, A History of the
Adirondacks (New York: The Century Co.,
1921; reprinted Mamaroneck, New York: Harbor
Hill Books, 1977), 2 volumes.
2. Magazine n.s. 1, (January 1836), 1-12:
reprinted in John W. McCoubrey American Art,
1700 - 1900: Sources and Documents
(Englewood, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall,
1965), hereafter cited as Cole, Essay
(1835).- American Richards William Trost bio custom oil paintings - Richards William Trost custom American oil painting from photo –custom oil painting Richards William Trost Bio by American custom oil paintings shop of oil painting from photo.
3. 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 Richards knew these important
documents.
4. "Elizabeth Valley," The Aldine, VI
(October 1873), 198
5. The sketchbook is in the collection of
the Brooklyn Museum of Art, accession no.
1975.15.2, Gift of Edith Ballinger Price.
6. William T. Richards to James Mitchell,
Florence, 7 December 1855, roll 2296,
Richards Papers, Archives of American Art.
7. Ibid. and William T. Richards to Thomas
Webb Richards, Paris, 29 August 1855,
typescript in Linda S. Ferber's collection. |
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