William Trost Richards ranks as one of the leading members of the second generation of American landscape painters, and LACMA's acquisition of one of his rare finished drawings, Woodland Interior, adds significantly to the museum's coverage of American mid-nineteenth-century landscape art. In this large and impressive work, the artist combines the romanticism that was the basis of the Hudson River school aesthetic with the "truth to nature" call of John Ruskin. Indeed, from the granular stony rocks to the almost weightless single blades of grass, Woodland Interior is amazingly varied in its range of graphic techniques for delineating the minutiae of nature.
