William Trost Richards at Pennsylvania Academy (2nd review)

Watercolor is a tricky medium to work in. It requires a great deal of control. You need just enough pigment, just enough moisture.

Imagine trying to create a watercolor painting that measures, say, three by four inches. Yes, that's inches, not feet. It's a surface about the size of a postcard.

Now imagine that that you're trying to paint not a flower or a teacup, but a complete landscape. Not an abstract landscape, mind you, or an expressionistic landscape, but a realistic one.

Let's say in fact that you're enamored of the works produced by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, with their unique blend of realistic detail at the service of an idealized, romantic content.

Finally, let's say that you accomplished this not once or twice but 70 or 80 times, producing a veritable gallery in miniature.

Now you have some idea of what William Trost Richards achieved.

Big drama, small scale

Richards created these tiny masterpieces for his friend and patron, the industrialist George Whitney, as a sort of thank-you for his support, and jokingly referred to them as "coupons." They're mostly set in New England. The coast of Massachusetts and Newport, R.I., were particularly favored venues, but Richards also traveled as far afield as the storm-lashed coast of Cornwall, because he liked drama— even if he reduced it to the scale of a postcard.

Richards of course also produced "real art"— large oil paintings of landscapes fit to grace the walls of mansions or, in latter days, art museums. About a dozen of these are on display at Pennsylvania Academy as well. They're impressive enough in their own right; they possess size and "weight"; but they don't glow the way those tiny watercolors do.

He "'got' Bryant

In any case, no matter which size or medium he worked in, Richards remained a committed Romantic. His award-winning painting of an ominous sea is titled Old Ocean's Gray and Melancholy Waste— a line from William Cullen Bryant's romantic masterpiece Thanatopsis— and it's no artistic affectation. One senses that Richard's "gets" what Bryant was trying to say.

But my personal favorite among all the large oils is the dreamy and quietly compelling February— as magical an evocation of twilight on a winter's day as anyone could hope for.

This is a fine show and deserves to be seen. After all, how often will the Pennsylvania Academy "deck its halls" with these nuggets from Richards's "Mine of Beauty"?♦


To read another review by Anne R. Fabbri, click here.