William Trost Richards: True to Nature: Drawings, Watercolours, and Oil Sketches - Hardcover

William Trost Richards (1833-1905) began his career as an artist of the Hudson River School. His meticulous studies of plants growing along the Hudson together with his drawings and watercolors of the Adirondacks, the Catskills, and his native Pennsylvania reveal a sensibility devoted to the close observation of nature. In the 1870s, however, when grand-scale landscape painting was going out of fashion, Richards turned to the watercolor medium and marine subjects, such as scenes of surf rolling on the New England coast. The artist is celebrated in this catalogue reproducing 230 works in pencil, watercolor, charcoal, and an essay by Carol Osborne, curator at the time the works were given to the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, places these works in the context of the artist's life.

Carol M. Osborne was associate director and chief curator of the Stanford University Museum of Art (now the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts) from 1978 to 1993. Her doctoral thesis Pierre Didot the Elder and French Book Illustration, 1789-1820 was published by Garland (1986). Among her other publications are books and articles on the Stanfords as art collectors, the Cantor Center's drawing collection and American artists abroad in the late nineteenth century. Her catalogue Venetian Glass of the 1890s: Salviati at Stanford University was also published by Philip Wilson (2002).