Collections: American Art: Sketchbook: English Coastal Scenery

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Sketchbook: English Coastal Scenery

Richards was a prolific artist who, as a leading member of the American Pre-Raphaelites, embraced the Ruskinian principle of truth to nature. Sketching outdoors played a significant role in his quest for accuracy of representation. Throughout his long career and extensive travels, he seems to have always carried a sketchbook with him, filling the pages with drawings of the places he encountered. The Brooklyn Museum owns more than twenty-five of Richards’s sketchbooks, including the ones on view here. Serving as pictorial diaries of his journeys, they also demonstrate the variety of his working methods, ranging from quickly rendered outlines to carefully modulated tonal compositions to finished color studies.


This text refers to these objects: 75.15.1; 86.53.5; 1993.225.7

• Artist: William Trost Richards, American, 1833-1905
• Medium: Graphite and some watercolor on beige, medium thick, smooth wove paper
• Dates: 1878
• Dimensions: Closed: 5 1/4 x 7 3/8 in. (13.3 x 18.7 cm) Open: 5 1/4 x 10 5/8 in. (13.3 x 27 cm)
• Collections: American Art
• Museum Location: This item is not on view
• Accession Number: 1993.225.7
• Credit Line: Gift of Edith Ballinger Price
• Image: Overall, 1993.225.7_PS2.jpg. Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2007
William Trost Richards (American, 1833-1905). Sketchbook: English Coastal Scenery, 1878. Graphite and some watercolor on beige, medium thick, smooth wove paper, Closed: 5 1/4 x 7 3/8 in. (13.3 x 18.7 cm) Open: 5 1/4 x 10 5/8 in. (13.3 x 27 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Edith Ballinger Price, 1993.225.7 (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 1993.225.7_PS2.jpg)
• Catalogue Description: The sketchbook has 72 pages with 102 drawings; several drawings at one end of book are in watercolors, but most are in graphite.