William Trost Richards (1833-1905)

William Trost Richards began sketching and painting shorelines between New Jersey and New England in the 1860s. He spent the summer of 1865 on the island of Nantucket and produced the present panoramic view of the coastline. As demonstrated by this example, nineteenth-century art critic George William Sheldon described Richards' Nantucket paintings as "remarkable works--remarkable for their loving and elaborate reproduction of surf, breaker, wave, and sand." (American Painters, New York, 1879, p. 62)