A Nineteenth Century Hoosier Artist Samuel Richards, 1853-1893
1948; Indiana University Press; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1942-9711
Autores Tópico(s)Art History and Market Analysis
ResumoThe nineteenth century contemporaries of Samuel Rich ards accorded him first rank as painter of pictures and al so gave him an unchallengeable place in their affections. For this gentle Hoosier artist was talented and gifted both in working with inanimate canvas and in living with his fel lows. Rarely has an artist in forty-year life-span achieved such gratifying professional recognition as well as such satis fying human relationships. Samuel Richards, the eldest of four sons, began life in 1853 at Spencer, Indiana, in the home of an able lawyer father and gifted, imaginative mother. These four boys were left motherless at an early age but Sam always felt that he in herited his artistic talent from his maternal parent. In the picturesque hills of Owen County and in the region that is familiar to us as McCormick's State Park, this lad grew up and early reveled in the beauty about him as he tramped the river banks and the beautiful wooded slopes. At school age, he was trying to transfer to paper, blackboard, or wooden slab with charcoal, chalk, pencil, or penknife what he observ ed in nature as well as portraits of the people he saw about him. The making of these early though crude sketches quick ened the lad's ardent desire to draw and paint and by the time he entered his teens, he had pledged himself unreservedly to pursue an artist's career. Unlike most youths' aspirations to be fireman, jockey, or policeman, Sam's first ambition remained his life-long determination despite parental disap proval and seriously impaired physique. But his diversity of interests and his lack of funds led him, for time, to explore his many capacities. He wrote some adolescent verses which he sent on to Henry W. Long fellow and received from the New England poet a letter full of kindness but of gentle discouragement.1 He taught him
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