Worthington Whittredge Born and raised on a farm near Springfield, Ohio, on the sparsely settled frontier, he established himself as one of the foremost painters of the Second Generation Hudson River School painters. His subject matter is the Catskill Mountains of New York state and the Great Plains of the frontier West. Growing up as a trapper and hunter, 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. He taught himself portrait and landscape painting and 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, he enrolled in the Dusseldorf Academy in Germany and spent 5 years there studying there with Carl Lessing and Andreas Achenbach, and another 5 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, he devoted himself to American landscape subjects. He became a typical Hudson River school painter, showing special skill with sunlight filtering through dense foliage and scenes of savage beauty and wondrous promise. He also did a few still lifes as well as domestic interiors and exhibited his work at the National Academy of Design of which he became a member in 1861 and served briefly as President. In 1866, he, along with painters John Frederick Kensett and Sanford Robinson Gifford, accompanied General John Pope on a Missouri territory expedition over the Oregon Trail and into Colorado and New Mexico where they met Kit Carson in Santa Fe. Whittredge was profoundly affected by this trip, especially inspired by the plains landscape to which he returned two more times. He used great horizontal masses and variegated light to create a sense of vastness and quietude. From his three trips West, he created only about forty oil sketches from which he did studio paintings in New York. He died in Summit, New Jersey.

Biography with permission from AskArt.com

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