Modern Age
Worthington Whittredge (1820–1910)
American Hudson River School painter.
Worthington Whittredge (born Thomas Worthington Whittredge) grew up on a farm near Springfield, Ohio, and taught himself to paint while working as a house and sign painter, portraitist, and daguerreotypist in Cincinnati. In 1849 a group of patrons financed a study trip to Europe, and he spent the 1850s at the Düsseldorf Academy — where he became a close friend of the expatriate history painter Emanuel Leutze and posed for figures in Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware — before several years in Rome among the American artists' colony.
Returning to New York in 1859, Whittredge found he had to unlearn his polished European manner in order to paint American scenery honestly. He became a central figure of the Hudson River School, working from the Tenth Street Studio Building and rising to the presidency of the National Academy of Design in 1875. His finest eastern pictures are quiet, silvery forest interiors and luminous coastal scenes rather than grand panoramas.
In 1866 he crossed the Great Plains to the Rocky Mountains with General John Pope's inspection party, returning west in 1870 (with Sanford Gifford and John Kensett) and again in 1871. The vast, level quiet of the Colorado plains and the Platte and Cache la Poudre rivers moved him more than the spectacle of the mountains, and his understated Western landscapes — of which the Anschutz Collection in Denver holds notable examples — count among the most contemplative American responses to the frontier. He died in Summit, New Jersey, in 1910.
The words the record keeps using: serene, luminous, contemplative, quiet, intimate, atmospheric, restrained.
At a glance
- Lived 1820–1910
- Origin American
- Worked in New York, Düsseldorf
- Era Modern Age
- Movements Hudson River School
- Mediums Oil on panel, Oil on canvas
- Techniques Oil glazing, Atmospheric perspective, En plein air painting
Works in the archive
- The Old Hunting Grounds, 1864 (Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem)
A decaying birch-bark canoe lies half-sunk in a still forest pool, screened by slender birches, an elegiac meditation on the vanished Native presence in the eastern woods. It is one of Whittredge's most admired forest… - A Home by the Seaside, 1872 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)
A weathered coastal homestead sits amid meadow and scrub above a quiet stretch of shore. The picture joins Whittredge's love of gentle, inhabited nature to the wide horizontal calm of his New England coastal work, warm… - On the Cache la Poudre River, Colorado, 1876 (Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth)
A slow bend of the Cache la Poudre threads through cottonwoods and quiet plains under a wide, luminous Colorado sky. Whittredge returned to this motif repeatedly after his Western trips; the picture distills the level… - Second Beach, Newport, 1878 (National Gallery of Art, Washington)
A broad, low-horizoned stretch of the Rhode Island shore with cattle, figures, and a pale summer sky. The Newport beaches gave Whittredge an eastern equivalent of the plains' horizontal calm, and he painted them in…
What was said
Returning from a decade in Europe, Whittredge recalled feeling almost bewildered before American scenery and recognizing that he had to put aside his acquired Düsseldorf habits and learn to see and paint the native landscape honestly on its own terms.
Recounting his 1866 crossing of the Great Plains, Whittredge described being more deeply impressed by the vast, level solitude and immense quiet light of the prairie than by the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains, and set out to capture that stillness.
In his memoir Whittredge recalled his Düsseldorf friendship with Emanuel Leutze, including posing as a model for figures in Washington Crossing the Delaware — an academic training in disciplined drawing and finish that underlies the calm precision of his later landscapes.
Lineage
Learned from Albert Bierstadt
What would Worthington make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Worthington Whittredge", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Worthington · Keep a life moment the way Worthington would · Pictures made after Worthington