Still Life with Head and Spear (from Sketchbook X)

This sketchbook contains fifty-one drawings in graphite and ink, primarily of Pacific Northwest landscape and marine subjects. The addition to the Museum’s collection of this and one other sketchbook (1992.2.1) of New England and Pennsylvania landscape and marine subjects by Richards virtually completes a representation of the range of the artist’s graphic achievement. The books are remarkable for both highly finished compositions and for pages of rapid notes probably taken during strolls through the countryside. The pages testify to Richard’s tireless pleasure in observing nature, to the sketchbooks utility as a rehearsal place for his hand, and to the vivid impressions he could produce with the simplest of means. Not least of all, they offer a key understanding to the artist’s uncanny facility in his better known paintings and watercolors.