Masterpieces of the Sea/Chapter 1
WILLIAM T. RICHARDS
MASTERPIECES OF THE SEA
I
I have passed so many pleasant hours in the company of Mr. Richards that the sweet and strong personality has almost replaced in my memory the claims of the distinguished artist. He used to come in to see me for a chat of half an hour or more, and he would discourse on so much that was delightful, yet outside the pale of his art, that I sometimes forgot, and still forget, that the kindly, intellectual gentleman was also a masterful painter.
He would enter almost shyly, so modest and quiet was he—a short, slight frame, little in keeping with the great forces he evoked in his work. He was clad in demurest colors and often wore a soft black hat dented at the top, which crowned his benign white hair as an artist likes. There was nothing of the pose of his craft about him, no eccentric hue or fashion; and yet his manner, the cast of keen observation in his face, and the easy grace of his carriage, denoted the man of original thought and unconstrained opinion, the artist who sees a little deeper into objective life than most people, and whose instincts are, therefore, less confined to convention.
No tame acceptance of authority was his; he thought for himself in his gently self-reliant fashion, and he had evolved a tranquil philosophy that was drawn both from just perception and wide reading.
And the face below the hat—what sweet serenity of expression; what goodness, that would laugh at prudery but sympathize with its limitations; what tolerance and friendliness and acceptance; what invitation to intercourse, and what understanding of human needs! And yet, however much the feelings and heart may have been moved, within that face there was no grief and bitterness; no vain impulses hurried it; no ambition ruffled _DjVu_pg_15.jpg)
its surface; only love, that was manly and unassertive, and human kindness and intellect that ran into smiles and quiet laughter, or into clear receptiveness. Rarely have I seen so sweet a masculine countenance in the maturity of white-haired age, as was his.
And yet he was a shrewd and careful manager of his own fortunes. He had an uncommon grip on those affairs in his career which brought his elder years into competence and substantial comfort. He well knew the worth of his canvases, while always denying them the too great qualities assigned by others. He always modestly put praise aside with an apt estimate of his own talents. He knew he could draw matchlessly, and yet there were elements in the portrayal of a breaking wave that he had never achieved to his own satisfaction. If you pressed him with commendation on the side of drawing he would shield his modesty behind his struggles with that miracle of color under the curving wave. He had studied this for years. His son tells us that "he stood for hours in the early days of Atlantic City or Cape May, with folded arms, studying the motion of the sea,—until people thought him insane. After days of gazing, he made pencil notes of the action of the water. He even stood for hours in a bathing suit among the waves, trying to analyse the motion." He could paint the action and color of the water more faithfully than most artists, and his rendition of it was an inspiration to untrained eyes; but he believed that there was a level of truth above his execution, and he kept his youth alive to the end in following this ideal.
His alertness in the business of art was not incompatible with the most unflinching adherence to his standards of perfection. His old friend, Mr. W. H. Willcox, tells an anecdote of a one-time celebrated picture by Mr. Richards which illustrates this. "He painted," says Mr. Willcox, "a blackberry bush in the open air, which almost everybody conversant with art in Philadelphia at that period still remembers. Mr. _DjVu_pg_19.jpg)
J. R. Lambdin made a sketch at the same time, not far from where Richards was working. A boy, looking at Lambdin's picture, said: 'Mister, how long did it take you to make that?' Lambdin mentioned a few days, when the boy said, 'Good for you; that fellow up there has been all summer over his.'" In further illustration of the trait in question, Mr. Willcox tells us that "the picture was not more than twenty inches long, but it made a marked impression in art circles, and sold for six hundred dollars. Subsequently the owner became financially embarrassed, and asked Richards to sell it for him. Richards replied by promptly taking it off his hands at the same price. Richards probably knew that he never would do that kind of thing again, and wished to retain it. But it finally cracked, though the faithful work on it is still visible."
His eldest daughter, Mrs. William F. Price, also has in mind his unfailing standards when she says: "Concerning this time he used to tell a story of his young friends and fellow artists. Mocking and jeering at his industrious ways, they would come in on pleasant summer afternoons when he was either working busily to finish a picture or preparing to go out sketching, and beg him to go with them on some pleasure trip. He was an old fossil, they declared, and would never get anywhere in the world if he stuck so fanatically to his work. 'To succeed you must be a man of the world,' said one, who was later, alas! a tragic and pathetic failure. Of the others none in any way approached his success, but for all of them he kept an unabated and loyal friendship."
Perhaps the trait of self-preservation which is so often omitted from the equipment of artists, and which in the early days of Mr. Richards' youth was conspicuously so, may be of kin with the capacity to see justly, which Mr. Richards had in a marked degree, and which so many of our earlier painters lacked. He could see the details of the blackberry bush with unerring power, _DjVu_pg_23.jpg)
and he could, even early in life, take note of opportunity with foresight and courage that yielded him the freedom his art required. He knew his strength very justly, and he shrewdly relied on it. Mr. Willcox says: "He amazed me by getting married and resigning his position as designer in order to devote himself entirely to his art. I don't remember which event took place first, but I thought the latter extremely unwise—and so it would have been with anyone else, but timidity had no place in his nature."
All this denotes a touch of life beyond the monopolizing palette, and in the same vein lie the wide sympathies with other intellectual currents which made Mr. Richards' company so alluring. He was apt in all the pleasant devices of conversation, full of humor and quiet laughter, full of diverting stories from his travels and his contact with life in many countries, and full of that large acquaintance with books that furnishes a ripe mind with overflowing talk. His household was always strewed with books and his memory was strewed with their varied contents. But his favorite subject, with me, at least, was poetry, and among poets, of Wordsworth. He would quote short passages—I remember, of the "River Duddon" sonnets—and other beautiful and tranquil things, and talk on and on, lying back easily in his chair in the fullest enjoyment of the subject, until this would lead him to, perhaps, religion and creed and dogma, when he would utter those independent views of his in well-chosen fluency and show the fuller deeps of that ripe and original mind which had found so many secrets of the land and sea.
Even in youth this sympathy with every form of intellectual thought and work was evident. Thus he became one of the active members of "The Forensic and Literary Institute," formed of young debaters, several of whom afterwards made fame. One was Frank R. Stockton, the humorist and story-teller who invented "The Lady or the Tiger"; another was his brother, John D. Stockton, of the New York Herald staff; Judge James T. Mitchell, of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, was a member; and Professor George Stewart, of Haverford College; the Rev. J. Spencer Kennard, and Judge Ashman, of the Philadelphia Orphans' Court, were others.
In the fullness of time, the independence of judgment with which the eager young artist had started out was shown in the blessed choice of a wife, and in the events which brought fulfilment and made a home never to be forgotten by those who knew it. We are told that Dr. Matlack, the father of Mrs. Richards, was not easily reconciled to the marriage of his daughter with an obscure young artist, whose career might lead to trials and severities. But the young man was resolute and met the elder with a firm front and a determination which, while not melting the stern old Quaker, who perhaps looked upon art as an immorality, was not to be put aside. The marriage took place in spite of the interview, and a long career of brilliant success justified the step and reconciled opposing views. It was, perhaps, this self-reliance and quiet courage of attitude toward daily life which gave the slender frame, the unadventurous cast of mind, a bias for painting the most savage seas and the most overpowering cliffs. It was always a problem to me why this small, quiet gentleman should have found his joy along the wildest of coasts. We associate the big muscular man with such employment. But Mr. Richards, light and delicate of mould, was fascinated by the grim scenery of Tintagel and Staffa and loved the cliffs he found in Maine and Rhode Island.
Indeed, it was he who first built a house on the bare granite front of Conanicut Island opposite Newport, and it is told of him that he was one day painting on this rugged shore when a tidal wave rolled in and almost carried him back with it. I do not remember to have seen him swim in the salt, though he _DjVu_pg_29.jpg)
may have done so when he was younger, and I am told that he knew how to swim and taught his children to do so, but he never learned to sail a boat, and rowed only in a most unprofessional way.
His love for the sea was not of the physical order. He had no desire to overcome its force, but he could subdue it to his brush, and it was perhaps a sense of this which stimulated his passion. He felt his mastery and he loved its object.