Born in a log cabin and raised on a farm near Springfield, Ohio, on the sparsely settled frontier, Worthington Whittredge was to later establish himself as one of the foremost painters of the Second Generation Hudson River School painters. His artwork incorporates the topographical style of the Hudson River School with the use of light and color typical of the French Barbizon School and Impressionism. His subjects include the Catskill Mountains in New York and the White Mountains in New Hampshire, in addition to the Great Plains of the American West.
Growing up as a trapper and hunter in Ohio, he had little formal art education. In 1837, at age 17, he went to Cincinnati to work with a brother-in-law, Almon Baldwin, who was a house and sign painter. Whittredge taught himself portrait and landscape painting, experimented briefly in Indianapolis with daguerreotypes, and then opened a portrait studio in Charlestown, West Virginia. However, after 1843, he focused on painting landscapes.
When he was in Cincinnati, he met many supporters of the arts including Nicholas Longworth, who became his patron and sent him to Europe. In 1849, Whittredge enrolled at the Royal Academy in Dusseldorf, Germany and spent five years there studying there with Carl Lessing and Andreas Achenbach. I n Germany he developed an aesthetic that emphasized the meticulous recording of naturalistic details. The use of color and light in his landscapes is often referred to as a style that anticipated the forthcoming work of French Impressionists. He went on to spend another five years in Rome where he was part of the artists' group that included Frederick Church and Nathaniel Hawthorne. He also visited Switzerland and Paris and was exposed to but rejected the Barbizon style of painting depicting peasant figures in landscape.
He returned to New York City in 1859, and, realizing his paintings of European landscapes were not well received, devoted himself to American landscape subjects, producing views of New York and New England. He became a typical Hudson River school painter, showing special skill with sunlight filtering through thick foliage and scenes of savage beauty and wondrous promise.
Whittredge made a total of three trips into the West but produced only about forty oil sketches and studio paintings based on Western subjects. Most were painted in his New York City studio from sketches made during his first journey to the West in 1866. A work in the Museum of Nebraska Art is, however, one on-site painting done along the South Platte River on his last trip in 1871.
In 1896, Whittredge took a sketching trip to Mexico with Hartford native Frederic Church, who had been one of the nation's leading landscape painters.
The evolving and changing style of his landscape paintings reflect the variety and flux of American society at the time. He is numbered among the practitioners of luminism, as his paintings contain a minutely executed tonal quality marked by intense illumination, expressing a mysterious, atmospheric silence.
Notable works include the Camp Meeting (1874; Metropolitan Museum) and Third Beach, Newport (Walker Art Center, Minneapolis). He also did a few still life as well as domestic interiors and exhibited his work at the National Academy of Design, where he served two terms as president. He also played a central role in the development of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Around 1890, William Merrit Chase painted a portrait of Whittredge.
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