Page:Masterpieces of the sea (Morris, Richards, 1912).djvu/22

WILLIAM T. RICHARDS young friends and fellow artists. Mocking and jeering at his industrious ways, they would come in on pleasant summer afternoons when he was either working busily to finish a picture or preparing to go out sketching, and beg him to go with them on some pleasure trip. He was an old fossil, they declared, and would never get anywhere in the world if he stuck so fanatically to his work. 'To succeed you must be a man of the world,' said one, who was later, alas! a tragic and pathetic failure. Of the others none in any way approached his success, but for all of them he kept an unabated and loyal friendship."

Perhaps the trait of self-preservation which is so often omitted from the equipment of artists, and which in the early days of Mr. Richards' youth was conspicuously so, may be of kin with the capacity to see justly, which Mr. Richards had in a marked degree, and which so many of our earlier painters lacked. He could see the details of the blackberry bush with unerring power, 12