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.