Joachim Ferdinand Richardt

Danish, 1819 - 1895

BiographyJoachim Ferdinand Richardt was a Danish-born landscape artist whose career spanned the second half of the nineteenth century. Born in Brede, Denmark in 1819, Richardt began his artistic training at the age of sixteen at the Royal Danish Art Academy in Copenhagen and quickly gained notice for his skills as a painter, draftsman, and printmaker. Trained during the Golden Age of Danish art, Richardt learned to prize local subjects, landscapes, and architecture and portray idealized, picturesque versions of his surroundings. From the beginning of his career he was drawn to majestic, natural scenery and established a life-long pattern of traveling and sketching the countryside during the summer months and using the winters to translate his meticulous field studies of houses and landscapes into oil paintings and lithographs. By the late 1840s he had developed a reputation for documenting Denmark’s natural and built environment through his paintings as well as through his series of published lithographic views, Prospects of Danish Manor Houses (1844-1868) and Scanish Manor Houses (1852-1863). Between 1855 and 1859 Richardt traveled throughout the eastern United States, focusing his attention on Niagara Falls and similar American tourist destinations in Canada, New England, the upper Midwest, southern Appalachians, and mid-Atlantic region, with the goal of publishing an illustrated work on this country. His work in this period can increasingly be characterized as more objective and naturalistic than picturesque. After returning to Denmark, Richardt similarly traveled to England, France, and possibly Italy during the 1860s, capturing views of local architecture in urban and rural settings. In 1873, Richardt and his wife Arndine Sophia Lennemann Schneider, migrated permanently with their children to the United States, settling by 1876 in Oakland, California. In his later years Richardt continued to paint picturesque views of the West Coast while also establishing a teaching studio. Richardt died in Oakland on October 29, 1895, and is buried at Oakland’s Mountain View Cemetery.

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