St. John's Head, Hoy, Orkneys

William Trost Richards, an important American landscape and marine painter, rendered the natural world with great fidelity. He frequently took sketching trips to the Catskill and Adirondack Mountains to gather source material for his art. In the early 1890s, he travelled to the Scottish Isles. There he created small oil sketches that captured the dramatic geological features of the sea cliffs of St. John's Head at Hoy, an island in the Orkneys. Like the two graphite sketches drawn nearly three decades earlier, Richards made the quick oil study on site with the likely intention of using it as a visual aid for a larger, more finished painting to be created in his studio.