Hudson River School Art

Worthington T. Whittredge On the Upper Delaware, circa 1875 Signed lower right; titled on the reverse Oil on canvas 14 1/4 x 11 inches Provenance: Private Collection, Woodbury, Connecticut The Upper Delaware in the Catskills was one of Whittredge's favorite trout fishing and sketching locations, and together with Hudson River School artist Jervis McEntee, would venture out in the late summer and early autumn to enjoy the flora and fauna. Worthington Whittredge, an important member of the later Hudson River School, is best remembered as a landscape painter who celebrated the beauty of the Catskill Mountains as well as the American West. Born in 1820, on a farm near Springfield, Ohio, he moved to Cincinnati in 1837 where he began working as a house painter's assistant to his brother-in-law. He gradually advanced to sign and banner painting and to a little portrait work. He went to West Virginia where he painted portraits but after a discouraging season there he turned exclusively to landscape painting in 1843. Whittredge's works from this period reveal the romantic influences of artists such as Thomas Cole and Thomas Doughty. Cincinnati at that time boasted a wealthy community of art lovers headed by a patron, Nicholas Longworth, who after three years, made possible Whittredge's move to Europe to study painting in 1849. He arrived first in London and then toured through Belgium and Germany and spent the summer sketching along the Rhine. Traveling back through Belgium, he arrived in Paris, but as he was unimpressed by the Barbizon painters, he moved on to Düsseldorf, the major center for the study of landscape painting, where he spent five years under Carl Lessing and Andreas Achenbach. Like many other American artists in Düsseldorf, Whittredge was called upon by Leutze to pose for his Washington Crossing the Delaware. He of course came in contact with many other American artists. Among them was the young Albert Bierstadt who came from New Bedford, Massachusetts. It was with Bierstadt that Whittredge enjoyed many sketching trips to Westphalia. Whittredge's mature style incorporates both European and American influences. For a time he adopted the hard, relatively monotone palette of the Düsseldorf School but later he asserted that this German style "was not enough and never will be enough to satisfy us in the realm of art". In 1854, Whittredge traveled through Switzerland to Italy where he remained for five years, until 1859. There, he was part of an artist's colony that included Frederick Church, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sanford Gifford, George Loring Brown and the sculptors Thomas Crawford...