The Art Gallery at the Athenaeum contains one of America’s unique collections of 19th century American paintings. Each week we will feature a different work on this page. We hope educators will use this link as a tool to enrich their art curriculum. Vermonters and other citizens throughout the nation can now visit our gallery in this new, intimate, and informative way.
The text describing each painting was written by Mark D. Mitchell, Assistant Curator of Nineteenth-Century Art at the National Academy Museum. The digital images were prepared by Robert Jenks of Jenks Studio of Photography in St. Johnsbury, VT.
Please note that the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum prohibits the use of images from its collection in public exhibition, broadcast, electronic reproduction or publication in any form without prior written permission from the institution. If you would like to reproduce any of the Art Gallery images in any form, contact Irwin Gelber at 748-8291, extension 307.
Worthington Whittredge (1820-1910), American
Fishing, around 1868-70
OIL ON CANVAS, 17 X 14 inches
Gift of the Estate of Horace Fairbanks
This intimate depiction of two figures fishing in a quiet stream has been characterized by leading Whittredge scholar Anthony Janson as "paradise regained, not on God's terms but man's." The spiritual aspect of American landscape painting, one of its cardinal traits, diminished in the wake of the Civil War and the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin's revolutionary On the Origin of Species. This peaceful forest interior, framed by the surrounding and overhanging trees, portrays the return to nature as respite from the demands of the urban world, rather than a spiritual pilgrimage.