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A private collection WILLIAM TROST RICHARDS (1833-1905) Idyllic Landscape, 1874 signed and d...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:100,000.00 - 150,000.00 USD
A private collection WILLIAM TROST RICHARDS (1833-1905) Idyllic Landscape, 1874 signed and d...
A private collection
WILLIAM TROST RICHARDS
(1833-1905)
Idyllic Landscape, 1874
signed and dated "Wm.T. Richards1874" (lower right)
oil on canvas on
panel-backed stretcher
24 1/8 x 20 1/8 in. (61.3 x 51.1 cm)
Estimate: $100,000-150,000 <p> Provenance
Private Collection, 1960 <p> Although by the mid-1870s William Trost Richards had turned his attention increasingly to seascapes and to the medium of watercolor, he still continued to paint major landscapes in oil, such as A June Day,1870 (Private Collection), Indian Summer, 1875 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art) and the newly-discovered Idyllic Landscape of 1874. With their sense of leafy enclosure, their reflecting ponds and their closely observed foreground detail, such paintings not only reflect the artist's pursuit of the Pre-Raphaelite ideal of "scrupulous fidelity" to natural forms, but also, in their pastoral serenity, the English Romantic poets, most notably William Wordsworth, whose writings Richards greatly admired. <p> Wordsworth, Ruskin, and the American painter Asher B. Durand had all suggested that such fidelity was, at its root, a recognition of the underlying presence of the divine in nature. Ruskin wrote, in Modern Painters, that the artist's duty is neither to choose, nor compose, nor imagine, nor experimentalize; but to be humble and earnest in following the steps of nature, and tracing the finger of God.1 <p> Like his friend Worthington Whittredge, Richards aspired to follow Ruskin's advice and subordinate the traces of his own hand to those of the Creator. "The best artist," advised the art periodical, The New Path, "is he who has the clearest lens, and so makes you forget every now and then that you are looking through him." Idyllic Landscape accomplishes this goal not only by its precise renderings of skunk cabbage, Queen Anne's Lace, tree bark, and rock, but also through its softly filtered luminosity and dappled shade. <p> We are grateful to Dr. Bruce Chambers for cataloguing this lot. <p> Notes 1 Quoted in Linda Ferber, William Trost Richards: American Landscape & Marine Painter, 1833-1905, Brooklyn, 1973, p. 24.
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