Dining Room Mackerel Cove, Jamestown, RI

William Trost Richards (1848-1920) was an original member of The Association for the Advancement of Truth, a group of artists devoted to following the precepts of the English art critic John Ruskin by painting meticulous, literal, exacting representations of nature. A contemporary described the detail Richards achieved where each blade of grass, each stone and flower was so finished that: “we seem not to be looking at a distant prospect, but lying on the ground with herbage and blossom directly under our eyes.” This painting of a scene near Richards’s home in Newport was completed in 1894 and shows the same exacting detail for which the artist is known.