Cormorant Cliff, Jamestown, Rhode Island (1877): Art, History and Details

Cormorant Cliff, Jamestown, Rhode Island (1877) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is William Trost Richards (American, 1833–1905).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

As a young artist, Richards was influenced by John Ruskin’s Modern Painters. Richards’s interest in Ruskin was particularly reflected in the younger artist’s meticulous geological studies made directly from nature. Richards strove for the fidelity to nature that he saw in the Pre-Raphaelite paintings exhibited in a show of British art at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1858. He is best known for his seascapes. Like the Impressionists, he was interested in capturing natural light and reflections on water and wet beaches, but his handling was tighter and his palette more tonal.

Object facts

• Title: Cormorant Cliff, Jamestown, Rhode Island
• Date: 1877
• Creator attribution: William Trost Richards (American, 1833–1905)
• Culture: America
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: watercolor and gouache
• Dimensions: Sheet: 58.4 x 94.1 cm (23 x 37 1/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - American 19th Century
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1969.125

Collection credit

Gift of the Reverend and Mrs. Danila Pascu

Further reading listed by the museum

• “A Check List. American Paintings and Water Colors of the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Early Twentieth Centuries in the Cleveland Museum of Art.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 60, no. 1 (January 1973): 21–35.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.