A native of Philadelphia, William Trost Richards was a leading light of American painting in the second half of the nineteenth century. His masterful observation and extraordinary technical skill embody the particular American mixture of the Pre-Raphaelitism of John Ruskin with the fidelity to nature advocated by Alexander von Humboldt. Richards's subjects were "ancient, noble, and poetic things." He believed that the "purest and most holy lessons may be learned from Nature. Lessons . . . stamped with such gigantic impress as if God's own hand had drawn them there."

Richards’s formal education ended at age thirteen when he left school to support his family by working as a commercial draughtsman designing ornamental metal fixtures. He studied painting privately with William Stanley Haseltine and Paul Weber from whom he learned a meticulous graphic technique. He was supported by local persons in Philadelphia, namely the collector George Whitney, who financed several of Richards’s trips to Europe. Richards did numerous pencil drawings and paintings of Italy and Switzerland and much painting along English, Irish, and Scottish coasts throughout his numerous voyages. Richards’s early works were most frequently landscapes, especially forest views, for which he had a “Wordsworthian reverence” and “a need to ponder upon [the] ‘ancient, noble, and poetic things’”. In the latter part of his career, Richards was firmly established as a coastal and marine painter, ever fascinated by the tumultuous phenomenon of water hitting rocks and beach.

A View of the Cornish Coast, dated to 1891, is a captivating display of Richards’s simultaneous awe and fear of the sea, the harsh cliffs and dramatic surf of the sublime English coastline meticulously recorded through Richards’s careful handling of his brush and paint. Richards’s son recalled that his father "stood for hours…with folded arms, studying the motion of the sea, until people thought him insane.” Richards’s dedication to capturing the “pure” and truthful essence of a land or seascape is not only admirable, but resulted in such a depiction of the light, atmosphere, and altogether sense of place of his chosen scenes as to allow the viewer to experience alongside Richard his at once “pragmatic and lyrical” view of nature. Coastal scenes became Richards’s focus after 1868 as he threw himself into the challenge of painting rugged coastline topography and the movement of the ocean both in America and Britain: “I watch and watch it, try to disentangle its push and leap and recoil, make myself ready to catch the tricks of the big breaker and am always started out of my self-possession by the thunder and the rush,” he wrote.

Richards traveled across England and Ireland between 1878 and 1880, seeking both new sights and new audiences as American art began to turn away from descriptive realism and toward a more painterly and subjective approach. Much of Richards’s time during this two year period was spent along the Southern coast of England, in Cornwall and Dorset. While in Cornwall, Richards wrote to his friend and patron George Whitney that “I have been busy surveying the coast, and think I ought to be here a lifetime to do any justice to it.” While Richards’s earlier landscapes, in accordance with Ruskinian teachings, worked to hide the artist and replace him with a ‘telescope’ in their leaf-by-leaf recording of nature, his seascapes are particularly remarkable in the way they manage to remain at once faithful to reality and convey a more poetic or subjective view. In A View of the Cornish Coast the English coastline is faithfully represented through the jagged, looming cliffs and the frothing sea, and the palette of yellow-greens which form the sky and water. The water seems almost to dance, throwing forth spray and salt and forming miniature jagged cliffs of its own. The viewer can almost smell the briny scent of the coast and feel the fresh, cold breeze and the splash of the waves. The taste of the salty air and the sound of the water and the birds fall into place as well, acting as the imagery might in one of Richards’s favorite Wordsworth poems.

In regard to Richards’s 1870 painting Newport Coast, Linda S. Ferber writes that “the ceaseless motive power of the sea is pitted against the equally powerful immobility of the rough coast, a contest of titans whose sublime overtones are reflected in the dark and stormy sky.” Although this analysis refers to a New England view, the same may be said of Richards’s A View of the Cornish Coast, the drama and sublimity amplified by the even greater topography of England.