Richards, William Trost

William Trost Richards (1833 - 1905) is regarded today as one of the finest landscape and marine painters of the 19th century. Richards was a native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In the 1850s he 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 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. Over the course of his career Richards traveled throughout America and Europe. In the 1850s and 1860s, he journeyed throughout the American northeast in search of subjects. In the late 1870s Richards began traveling to Europe in quest of discovering dramatic coastal scenery. Over the next twenty-five years he investigated the shorelines of Great Britain, France and Norway, among other places.