The Trout Pool, Worthington Whittredge (1868) Metropolitan Museum of Art

THE American landscape painter Worthington Whittredge was born in a log cabin in Ohio. He began painting in Cincinnati and then traveled to Europe where he was a student at The Academy in Dusseldorf, Germany. After ten years in Europe, he set up his studio in New York City and became part of what is known as the Hudson River School, a term originally coined by a hostile New York art critic. The painters are not just known for works depicting the romantic Hudson region, with its magnificent waterway, but for a general style of landscape painting and a reverence similar to that of Thoreau for the American wilderness and countryside. In the nineteenth century, Americans were ready to view nature as beautiful, rather than daunting or threatening, and thus the appeal of these painters, who saw the sublime in the elements outside the growing cities. Today, after many decades of surrealism, urban realism and abstract expressionism, their works are healing. From New York, Whittredge made trips into the Catskills and the White Mountains to paint his impressionistic and meditative canvases of the woods and mountains, including The Trout Pool, above. Even more than the woods of New York and New England, Whittredge loved the American plains, which he also traveled and painted.

Below is William Merritt Chase’s 1890 portrait of Whittredge.

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