Thomas Worthington Whittredge, born on a farm in Springfield, Ohio, first took up the artist's trade as an apprentice to his brother-in-law, a would-be artist and professional sign painter in Cincinnati. Whittredge worked as a daguerreotypist and portraitist before turning to landscape painting in the mid 1840s. His early landscapes were imbued with the American romantic spirit as expressed by Thomas Doughty and Thomas Cole. In 1846, Whittredge, a largely self-educated provincial, showed View on the Kanawha, Morning at the National Academy of Design in New York, where Asher B. Durand, the Academy's president, singled it out for praise. The painting was owned at the time by James Longworth, son of Nicholas Longworth, the prominent Cincinnati art patron.
In 1849, when Whittredge was already a respected and established young artist, he decided to go to Europe to refine his skills. He remained there for ten years, supporting himself by sending paintings home to a network of loyal Cincinnati patrons. Whittredge went initially to Belgium and France, but soon proceeded to Düsseldorf, drawn by the liberal reputation of the Düsseldorf Academy, but also by the important presence there of Emmanuel Gottlieb Leutze. Soon after his arrival in Düsseldorf, Whittredge modeled for Leutze, supplying the "American" quality needed for the figures of George Washington as well as the steersman in Leutze's iconic history painting, Washington Crossing the Delaware. Whittredge immersed himself in the lively artistic milieu of Düsseldorf, maintaining a close personal relationship with Leutze, in whose studio he met Albert Bierstadt, boarding for a year in the house of Andreas Achenbach, the premier Düsseldorf landscapist, and sketching in the countryside with another respected German landscape painter, Carl Friedrich Lessing.
In 1855 Whittredge traveled to Italy in company with Bierstadt and William Stanley Haseltine. He spent three years there mostly based in Rome, often in the company of Sanford Gifford and Frederic Church. By the time he returned to America in 1859, he was a cosmopolitan artist who had been exposed to a variety of European landscape styles and who moved within a wide circle of artistic acquaintances. Whittredge settled in New York City, and took a studio at the recently constructed Tenth Street Studio Building in 1860. The building was the center of New York artistic life during the period of Whittredge's tenancy, which lasted until 1900.
During the 1860s and 1870s, Whittredge enjoyed considerable professional and personal success. He was a highly regarded member of the second generation of Hudson River School painters. In 1866, 1870, and 1871 he traveled to the American West, sketching with John F. Kensett and Sanford Gifford during the 1870 trip, and discovering new vistas for his landscape painter's brush. He served in 1865, and again from 1874 until 1877, as president of the National Academy of Design, and was a member as well of the Century Association. In 1876 he was a member of the committee on American Art for the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. He married Euphemia Foote, seventeen years his junior, and began a family. In 1880, with his wife and three young daughters, Whittredge moved to a bucolic home in Summit, New Jersey, "Hillcrest," which was designed by the noted architect Calvert Vaux. In 1889, Whittredge was chosen to be the president of the Committee of United States Artists for the Paris International Exposition, a largely ceremonial position that recognized his eminent stature among American artists. As late as 1893 Whittredge was still traveling, going to Mexico with Frederic Church and producing a body of city views and watercolors that demonstrate his interest in the bright tonalities of the Impressionist palette. Whittredge wrote a patriarchal autobiography in 1905. His last known work was painted in 1907, when he was 87 years old.
