Sketch of Breaking Waves (from Sketchbook VII)

William Trost Richards

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This sketchbook contains forty-six drawings in graphite and ink, primarily of New England landscape and marine subjects. The addition to the Museum’s collection of this and one other sketchbook (1992.2.2) of Pacific Northwest landscape subjects by Richards virtually completes a representation of the range of the artist’s graphic achievement. The books are remarkable for both highly finished compositions and for pages of rapid notes probably taken during strolls through the countryside. The pages testify to Richard’s tireless pleasure in observing nature, to the sketchbooks utility as a rehearsal place for his hand, and to the vivid impressions he could produce with the simplest of means. Not least of all, they offer a key understanding to the artist’s uncanny facility in his better known paintings and watercolors.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.

Metropolitan Museum of Art