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
On the Plains, Colorado, 1872
OIL ON CANVAS,
30 x 50 inches
Gift of Horace Fairbanks
A relative latecomer to the American landscape movement, having spent much of his early career in Europe, Worthington Whittredge rapidly became its leading proponent during the 186os, drawing American artists further in the direction of contemporary European aesthetics. His ascendance peaked in the mid-1870s with his election to the presidency of the National Academy of Design in New York. Whittredge's style is characterized by sharp focus and compositional symmetry, balancing elements of the scene like weights on a scale, rather than leading our eyes through the landscape in a narrative sequence.
Originally from Ohio, Whittredge gained a reputation for his depictions of America's western landscape. On the Plains, Colorado revisits what was undoubtedly the artist's most iconic work, Crossing the Ford, Platte River, Colorado (1868, revised in 1870). Whittredge actually returned to the site of both works in 1870, four years after his first visit in 1866, hoping to recapture his initial inspiration. On the Plains, Colorado portrays a tribe of Indians encamped peacefully along the shore of the Platte River, uninfluenced and unthreatened by the arrival of Euro-American settlers. Whittredge was not alone in his fascination with America's disappearing frontier. In his travels west, he participated in a rising tide of nostalgia for the mythic Old West that reached fever pitch in the early twentieth century and remains widespread today.