 Good morning. I'll start with a few thank-yous as well. Most of them repeats of what Martha said. First of all, thank you to the Barnes. It's wonderful to have this symposium here. Thank you to Martha for bringing us all here and to Aliyah as well, and to Megan for, again, her wonderful talk last night. And also in advance to all of the students who are speaking here today. Those of us who have been mucking around in the field for a while now are thrilled to hear what's new out there. So thank you for your hard work and your intelligence. So I'm introducing my student, Kimia Shahi, and Kimia was an undergraduate at Dartmouth. She majored in art history, and then she went on to earn an MA at the IFA in New York, and she wrote a master's thesis on Bernard Picard, and she focused on his religious ceremonies and customs of the peoples of the world, a text that was published in the 1720s to the 1740s, and she focused on representations of the peoples of India in that particular text. Picard was an engraver and illustrator. She is now, obviously, a student at Princeton working with me, and she is at work on a study of the water and the shoreline imaginary in the 19th century as manifest in a range of imagery, everything from landscape paintings to nautical illustration. What you'll hear today is a portion of that study. She has publications in the works on Martin Johnson Heade and on something called the American Garden, which was a manifestation of the role or status or place of botany and the visual culture of botany in the China trade in the 19th century. While at Princeton she's been doing all kinds of things. I don't have time to list them all now, but among other things she's been contributing and has written for a catalog for an exhibition that is coming to Princeton very soon or that has originated at Princeton called Nature's Nation, American Art and Environment. She has also participated in Princeton's Environmental Institute as, let me see if I can get this right, a pre-doctoral energy and climate scholar at the Environmental Institute at Princeton. So part of what is, I don't want to say nascent but an emerging focus on the environmental humanities at Princeton. She spent between NYU and Princeton some time at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She will be the Wyeth pre-doctoral fellow in American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum this coming year. And her talk today, as I said, reflects work on her dissertation, which she'll be working even more on next year at SAM. Her talk today is entitled, Surface Tensions and William Trost Richer's Coastal Pictures. Please join me in welcoming Kimia. Good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you, Rachel, so much for that really kind introduction. And I echo the thanks to the Barnes Foundation, to Martha and Alia, to the organizers and to all of you present today. In the summer of 1876, artist William Trost Richer's wrote to his friend and patron, George Whitney, from his summer home and studio on the coast of Newport, Rhode Island, quote, I am trying to widen the limits of my material and I am having a hard fight. What with unsuccessful experiments and an ever-widening perception of the loveliness of nature and of the utter futility of any material, I am not having a jolly time. It is too much for me, perhaps for anybody, for I do not remember any picture which gives any idea of the awful power of the breaking of a big wave against the rocks, much less of the tumult of the back action as it meets the incoming wave. I begin with this passage because it foregrounds a set of interrelated concerns that animated Richard's practice and which form the center of my talk today. The encounter between a perceiving subject and the natural and phenomenal world, the difficulty of picturing the power and complexity of moving water, and the limits of an artist's material. These concerns came together in important and surprising ways in a rocky coast, a large-scale watercolor that offers particularly interesting insights into how Richard's engaged with the perceptual and material properties of water in and through the materials and techniques of the watercolor medium. A rocky coast measures about two feet high and three feet wide, which is relatively large for a watercolor. Some of you may recall seeing it last year at the Philadelphia Museum in the excellent exhibition American Watercolor in the Age of Homer and Sgt. On dark brownish-gray paper, Richard's has used a combination of transparent watercolor and more opaque pigments, or gouache, to articulate the stacked forms of rocks in rich blues, browns, ochres, whites, and blacks, which take up most of the composition. The rocks project outwards towards a moody sea, which crashes and laps against them in various states of agitation. This distilled yet monumental drama plays out under a heavy variable sky, against which the V-shapes of seabirds are silhouetted in black and white. A rocky coast is especially distinctive within Richard's oeuvre because it belongs to a group of experimental watercolors that the artist first began during that summer of 1876 in Newport. In these pictures, in place of his usual support, Richard's instead used a coarse thick paper that was commercially sold in large rolls and intended for use as cheap carpet liner. While I'm still trying to determine exactly where Richard's obtained the paper, it is worth noting that such paper would have been accessible near his home here in Philadelphia, as well as in Newport and other places he frequently traveled. Dark and fibrous, the carpet paper was very different than the smoother, lighter paper Richard's had favored up until then. Its availability in rolls allowed the artist to work at a larger scale, and its tone and uneven texture offered the opportunity for new approaches to both color and brushwork, and here I show you an image of the picture as framed. Richard's called this group of watercolors big drawings, or carpet paper drawings. It was initially these unsuccessful experiments to which he referred in 1876, raising the question of whether and how the carpet paper's distinctive materiality contributed to the artist's fight to widen the limits of his material. What might at first appear as blurriness or pixelation in this projected image is actually the paper's texture, modified in various ways by its interactions with the watercolor pigments that saturate and sit atop its surface. Details show how the paper's color and texture contribute to Iraqi coast's richness, dimension, and dynamism. The images on the left are my own photographs, while those on the right are from the high-resolution digital image provided by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The considerable differences between them show how difficult it is to photographically reproduce large-format watercolors. What is apparent, though, is how the paper is almost like another topographical feature of Iraqi coast. It shows through particularly prominently in areas of the sky, subtly enhances the texture of the rocks in the foreground, and thickens the fluffy solidity of the breaking waves. Using textured paper was not unheard of for 19th-century water colorists. A well-known example is British artist David Cox, who decades before Richards experimented with using fibrous wrapping paper to lend visible texture to his work. However, Richard's choice of commercial carpet liner was unorthodox in its time, and there is no single explanation for why he experimented with it in the late 1870s. Here I show some brief examples of other carpet paper drawings, alongside some period reproductions of works that are lost or not accessible to view to illustrate that the carpet paper drawings share a focus on the sea and coastal landscapes and also to show the variety of formal approaches the artist took to the paper itself. When the carpet paper drawings debuted to public audiences, critical reactions were ambivalent. One critic commented on their, quote, singularly weird character, end quote. Another even called the approach, quote, dangerously bad, drawing which does not represent nature, end quote. These critiques are especially striking given Richard's previous reputation for renderings of water, waves, and co-scenery that were widely praised for their fidelity to nature. Earlier coastal watercolors like Thunder Heads at Sea, The Pearl, or Beach Scene with Barrel and Acre, pictures about a quarter of a rocky coast size, incidentally, epitomized the precision and detail that critics attributed to the artist's gift for accurate observation. In pictures like these ones, one critic wrote, quote, the wrinkled hills of the middle ocean have been diagrammed and protracted and surveyed, end quote, almost as if subject to scientific instruments or operations designed to exceed the capabilities of the naked eye. By comparison, a rocky coast appeared sprawling, extravagant, and overtly painterly. The dark and uneven carpet paper inflects the composition very differently than the brighter, more even support Richards used in the earlier watercolors. Like many artists of his generation, Richards was an admirer of influential English critic John Ruskin, who argued that adherence to the so-called truth of nature was art's highest ideal. However, Richards was very rarely satisfied with his own efforts to picture truth or nature. This was especially true in relation to water. In numerous writings, Richards characterized his relationship with the ocean as a quote, struggle, just as his changing approach with his materials was a fight. His sense of futility in the face of breaking waves is similar to Ruskin's view that to capture water perfectly in a picture was fundamentally, quote, beyond the power of man, end quote. An artist could only ever approximate water's material and optical phenomena according to Ruskin. Richards and Ruskin were not alone in paying special attention to the challenges artists encountered when faced with the power and complexity of water. Interest in the problems and possibilities of picturing water was widespread among artists of the period, and a particularly famous example is Frederick Edwin Church's Niagara, a monumental and monumentally successful picture of water in various states of motion and evaporation that was lauded for conveying the spectacle of Niagara Falls to viewers with unprecedented detail and immediacy. The common thread connecting Richards' struggle with water to Ruskin's notion of its artistic impossibility and to the exceptional celebrity of Church's Niagara is the extent to which water's dynamism, its responsiveness to its surroundings, and its capacity to elude or frustrate vision amounted in each example to a kind of limit case or threshold of possibility for period understandings of truth in pictures. Richards' emerging preoccupation with coasts and water during the 1860s and 1870s coincided with his more serious embrace of water color. Raising questions about how his engagements with water as a subject and a medium informed his pictures' relationships to the natural world in terms of both truth and materiality. Two months before completing a rocky coast, Richards felt he was making progress and wrote, quote, My big drawings have opened my eyes to new and noble beauties in and out of doors. I feel that I know and see a great deal more than I did last year, end quote. How did Richards' perception of the difficulties of picturing water inform the making of a rocky coast? How can thinking about the material limits and possibilities of both water and carpet paper help us understand how drawings dismissed as not representing nature contributed to their maker's growing confidence that he saw and knew more about what he observed? Although a rocky coast gives ample evidence of close observation on the artist's part, a longer look at the picture shows that its details are much sharper towards the center and begin to fall out of focus towards the outer edges. Here's a detail. Here, the rocks are treated much more loosely in thinner washes of color that visibly bleed into each other. In comparison to the dense forms in the middle, the rocks on the edges appear less solid, seeming to sag and dissolve, almost as if the water Richards depicts throughout the picture as a foam buffeting the rocks, a film seeping over them, or a sheen of moisture licking their surfaces, has here acquired a material agency potent enough to leak into or out of the picture itself. So in these areas of the picture, the paper's modeled texture is also more visible, intruding into view precisely where the picture's lack of focus would suggest that these parts of the composition are meant to recede into the background. This intrusive surface draws attention to the drawing's ground, the paper, as a site of mediation and of disruption. Our encounter with the surface's obdurate materiality is further echoed in a rocky coast's composition. The rocky promontory in the center is positioned to occlude our view of the water in the distance, arresting the picture's perspectival recession, and keeping our gaze from moving too far beyond what is immediately before it. Richard's attention to paper does not, on its own, set a rocky coast apart from commonly shared approaches to the techniques and materials of watercolor at the time. A surface meant to show through layered tints of pigment or left bare to signify areas of light or color, as discussed in period publications like this one, paper was not a passive receptacle for pigment and solvent. These images illustrate the prominence of paper in technical discourses surrounding the medium, which also devoted ample space to the effects of transparent layering, as in the center, and of opaque whites against a colored ground, as in the study of water on the right. Whether transparent or opaque, in the most advanced watercolors, quote, the color no longer lies simply upon the surface of the paper, but in many instances is so saturated into its very pores, as really to become a part of it, end quote, that's as one 1868 pamphlet described. Yet watercolor paper had also to withstand cycles of wetting and scraping, drying and rewetting, as artists applied thin and thick layers of pigment to moist paper and then often corrected or tempered their work by rubbing or cutting areas of a picture with a knife, sponge, rag, finger, or bit of stale bread. Too much water and fine paper would disintegrate. Paper that was too thickly textured, however, was referred to as a distracting blemish on the picture's surface. To make a watercolor picture was thus inherently precarious. Either pigment, solvent, and ground remained in delicate balance, or the whole endeavor would collapse. Richards apparently joked that he got the carpet paper so cheap that he could afford to use more water. But their capacity to absorb more water meant that the colors in the carpet paper drawings apparently also look different entirely wet and dry, requiring an even greater awareness of process on the part of the artist. Considered in this context, Iraqi coast not only pushes the material limits of watercolor, it also makes them visibly unstable, proposing an analogy between the precarious convergences of wet and dry, water and ground, and the struggle and fight Richards associated with picturing water meeting land along shore. Iraqi coast is likely based on pulpit rock, a well-known geological formation in Nahant on the Massachusetts coast. A fashionable science in the period, geology was a topic of great interest for numerous landscape painters, including Richards, as was pulpit rock in particular, as these examples illustrate. Richards' well-documented interest in coastal geology is particularly compelling for the ways it intersects with his preoccupation with water, an element that was understood as a powerful geological agent in the period, responsible for moving rock and soil across great distances and carving out topography and coastlines over time. If we consider the rocks in Iraqi coast, buffeted by water, slick with moisture, as an expression of water's creative and destructive geological agency, we might then trace a connection to Richards' exploration of the material limitations and possibilities of watercolor on paper, making the picture not just a representation but an embodiment or allegory of geological processes in and through the precarious convergence of pigment and paper. In this sense, the carpet paper's textured surface, literally intended in its original purpose to function as a kind of ground, does not just render the picture both more and less legible in different ways, it does so in and through the specific operations and materials of watercolor. To conclude, the implications of thinking about Iraqi coast in this way are perhaps further developed in relation to a theory that Richards would put into words a few years later. Using an example of plants struggling to reach towards the light from beneath the shadow of a large stone, he argued that the most artistically appealing aspects of nature were, quote, those which are twisted and curved and give evidence of a fight for their lives. In everything, there is the same mutual influence, the dramatic modification which is the charm of its life, end quote. In this way, Richards characterizes the natural world less as a collection of discrete forms and more as a place of interaction and convergence, animated by the drama of circumstance. A site of material flux, erosion and transformation, the coast in many ways embodies Richards' concept of mutual influence. Just as the unstable surfaces of Iraqi coast reposition the artist's struggle to observe and record the sea coast within rather than apart from the mutual influences that animated it, the pictures engagement with water as a substance, medium and pictorial terrain, proposes an understanding of truth, nature and material in Richards' work less as received or stable concepts and more as constantly shifting operations, most meaningfully challenged and constituted in and through the precarities of picturing. Thank you.