1833–1905, American painter, b. Philadelphia, studied in Florence, Rome, and Paris, and settled in Germantown, Pa. Early in his career he painted landscapes and still lifes, but a year after buying a house in Newport, R.I. (1866), he turned to marine paintings. His light-struck seascapes, which follow in the tradition of luminism, are highly realistic. His work was long neglected, but interest in it revived in the last decades of the 20th cent.

William Trost Richards first visited England in 1878 after having established a successful career painting landscapes and shore scenes in America. He went first to the Cornish coast to find new coastal subjects for the American art market, which was beginning to tire of native subjects painted with mid-century descriptive realism. The cosmopolitan subjects favored in Munich, Dusseldorf, and Paris, where American painters were now going for study, were attracting an increasing number of patrons, and painting in which sunlight created a general mood rather than describing objects was gaining increased favor. Richards hoped not only to strengthen his repertoire with attractive foreign coastal subjects but also to establish himself in the London market. He succeeded in doing both. From the numerous Cornish sketches made on two more visits to the British Isles came paintings, two of which were exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1879 and quickly sold. Richards was to return to Europe once more but he would go back to England no less than four more times. He returned to America in 1880, and by 1882 he had built a house on Conanicut Island, across Narragansett Bay from Newport, with a spectacular view of the bay and sea. The market for his European and American coastal subjects in oil and watercolor continued and, although in 1885 he traveled to the Pacific coast in search of other subjects, Cornwall continued to remain popular.