Page:Masterpieces of the sea (Morris, Richards, 1912).djvu/44

WILLIAM T. RICHARDS with his maturing talents it is not an extreme presumption to say that his native gift received, at this impressionable period of his life, its largest force from the knowledge of such perfection. We know how such a trip affected Benjamin West, his fellow-townsman of an earlier day; how it colored all his after career and biased him for what was called "historical painting" and made him a leader of his day in the land of Reynolds and Gainsborough and Constable and Lawrence.

But this voyage of discovery was, perhaps, the outgrowth of other instincts than those of art, for the eternal masculine had, before this, met the eternal feminine and in seeking his fortunes up and down the world he was to learn how to lay the foundations of a home as well as to find a broad base for his artistic career.

At the house of Robert Pearsall Smith and his wife, Hannah Whitall Smith, in Germantown, a suburb of Philadelphia, young Richards had met Anna Matlack, 26