Alfred William Rich

Alfred William Rich (4 March 1856 – 7 September 1921), was an English watercolourist, teacher and author.

Rich was born between Scaynes Hill and Lindfield in Sussex. His study of art began at the age of eight, as a self-taught student inspired by the examples of Turner, Old Crome, and Constable at the National Gallery.

His professional art career began as a heraldic painter from 1870-1890. He studied briefly at the Westminster School of Art. But it was his six years of drawing from classical casts and from nature at the Slade School of Art, starting in 1890, which led him to his love of landscape and watercolour. He studied first under Alphonse Legros and subsequently under Professor Fred Brown. He was a member of the New English Art Club from 1898.

Rich was influenced by the watercolour techniques of Thomas Girtin, John Sell Cotman and Peter De Wint, especially their use of the rich blooms produced by applying a full wash and allowing it to dry undisturbed. But whilst he referred to the earlier school of watercolourists his works are all his own and were created as much as reaction to French Impressionism but with a peculiarly English slant. As Rich and a number of his contemporaries pointed out (including Roger Fry and Lawrence Binyon) it was arguably the English watercolour tradition of painting quickly En plein air that had inspired much of the Impressionism's original spontaneity and it was an area where the English artistic tradition could claim to have been innovative. Rich was an advocate of a natural approach to painting, trying to capture the emotions which a subject provoked, rather than accurately reproducing a scene. He had little feeling towards what he termed "exhibition pieces", which he viewed as being overworked. He was critical towards even some of the greatest masters who he believed were often guilty of marring their work by polishing over the traces of their original responses to a scene. He also disliked "pretty pictures", a term which he used to refer to the quaint works produced by some of his contemporaries and used this term as a thinly veiled criticism of the work of Helen Allingham.

...
Wikipedia