American Painting and Sculpture

THOMAS ADDISON RICHARDS
(American, 1820-1900)

Meditation in the Catskills, 1851
Oil on canvas
Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Irvin Abell, Jr. 1984.14

Meditation in the Catskills is a typical mid-nineteenth-century essay on the grandeur and solitude of the American wilderness. The forest’s stately first-grown trees and precipitous glens dwarf the lone human figure, yet the painting conveys a feeling of safe enclosure and repose rather than of peril and hardship.

Like John James Audubon a generation earlier, Thomas Addison Richards was an artist-explorer of the American wilderness. By the age of twenty-two, Richards had illustrated the first pictorial guide to Georgia, making him one of the earliest artists to portray the landscape of the Deep South. In 1845 Richards moved to New York City, where he became director of the Cooper Union School of Design for Women and corresponding secretary of the National Academy of Design. He continued to travel extensively, and in 1857 he published the first complete travel guide to the United States.