William Trost Richards is best known today for his luminous coastal scenes of Newport and New Jersey; however, during his early career, he created meticulous renderings of nature, which were heavily influenced by the American Pre-Raphaelite Movement. Richards began his career, not as a painter, but as a designer of ornamental metalwork for a local firm called Archer, Warner, and Miskey. Through this work, Richards acquired considerable skills as a draftsman, so that by the time he was twenty, he possessed a remarkably sophisticated vision and refined technique. Although his job prevented him from studying art full-time, Richards began to sharpen his drawing skills by sketching in the fields along the Schuylkill and Wissahickon Rivers. His summer vacations allowed him to travel and sketch further afield, and by 1854, Richards was confident enough in his abilities to quit his job and become a full-time artist.
Richards early landscape drawings reveal the aesthetic influence of John Ruskin, the father of the British Pre-Raphaelites. Ruskin believed that spiritual insight came from diligent examination and extreme fidelity to nature in the raw. In response to this belief, Richards produced drawings which appear almost as visual catalogues of what he saw before him in nature—every leaf and flower is recorded with meticulous accuracy and detail. During the summer and fall of 1858, he executed a series of plant studies, rendered with extraordinary botanical accuracy.
Leaf Study is an exquisite example of this body of work, and it reveals many of the characteristics of Richards’ approach to depicting nature. In this instance, Richards has isolated a small cluster of branches, and he has carefully recorded the shapes of the leaves and blossoms, highlighting certain areas with white gouache to add depth to the drawing. Moreover, like a botanist, he has recorded several facts about the species in the lower left-hand corner of the drawing, noting the height of the plant and the color and characteristics of the blossoms. These drawings serve almost as diary entries for Richards' study of nature, and they frequently informed his Pre-Raphaelite landscape paintings of the same period.