Thomas Worthington Whittredge was a highly regarded landscape painter during the third quarter of the nineteenth century. After a brief career in Cincinnati as a daguerreotypist and portrait painter in the early 1840s he turned to landscape painting in 1843. He began exhibiting in New York at the National Academy of Design in 1846 and later at the American Art-Union. With commissions for foreign scenery from Cincinnati patrons, he left for Europe in 1849, sketching in Belgium, France, and Germany before going to Düsseldorf, where he lived with Andreas Achenbach (1815-1910) and became an intimate of the circle around EMANUEL LEUTZE, even posing for several figures in Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). In 1856 Whittredge left Germany and toured Switzerland and Italy before meeting ALBERT BIERSTADT and SANFORD R. GIFFORD in Rome and settling there. On his return to the United States four years later, he established a studio in the popular Tenth Street Studio Building in New York and became a highly regarded member of the art community. He was admitted to the National Academy of Design in 1860 and elected its president in 1875, and he was invited to join the Century Association in 1862.
His desire to develop a native landscape style prompted Whittredge to travel extensively throughout the country. In 1866 he made the first of three trips west as a member of General John Pope’s expedition to Colorado and New Mexico, and in 1870 he returned to the West in the company of Gifford and JOHN F. KENSETT. Later, during the 1890s, he visited Mexico twice, once in the company of Frederic E. Church (1826-1900). Whittredge became especially known for several types of landscapes: shadowy woodland interiors in the tradition of Asher B. Durand (1796-1886), expansive views of the flat Western plains, often along rivers, and picturesque scenes of the rolling New England hills dotted with rustic buildings. Although Whittredge brought a tight, crisp painting style back with him from Düsseldorf and painted within the Hudson River aesthetic until his first trip to the West, that experience as well as his close friendship with Gifford stimulated him to develop an art more sensitive to light and atmosphere. His later landscapes are characterized by a breadth of vision and quiet luminosity.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
John I. H. Baur, ed., The Autobiography of Worthington Whittredge (1942; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1969) § Sadayoshi Omoto, "Old and Modern Drawings: Berkeley and Whittredge at Newport," Art Quarterly 27 (Winter 1964): 42-56 § Utica, N.Y., Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, and others, Worthington Whittredge Retrospective, exh. cat., 1969, with introduction by Edward H. Dwight, chronology § Anthony F. Janson, "The Paintings of Worthington Whittredge," Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1975, with bibliography, catalogue of paintings, lists of paintings exhibited at various locations and included in various sales, of completed commissions, and of lost paintings § Washington, D.C., Adams Davidson Galleries, Quiet Places: The American Landscape of Worthington Whittredge, exh. cat., 1982, with text by Cheryl A. Cibulka, chronology, bibliography, list of exhibitions.
