Thomas Worthington Whittredge (1820-1910) was one of the important American landscape painters of the nineteenth century and a central figure within the second generation of the Hudson River School. Born near Springfield, Ohio, Whittredge was largely self-taught in his early years, working as a sign painter, house painter, and daguerreotypist before turning fully to landscape painting. His early self-directed development gave him an unusually independent artistic sensibility that would inform his mature career for the rest of his life.

In 1849 Whittredge traveled to Europe, where he would remain for ten formative years. He settled in Düsseldorf, Germany, one of the most important centers of nineteenth-century landscape painting, and he studied under Andreas Achenbach at the celebrated Düsseldorf Academy. During his European years he formed close friendships with fellow American painters Emanuel Leutze and Albert Bierstadt, and he traveled extensively through Italy, Switzerland, and other European destinations, absorbing the great landscape traditions of the continent. His years abroad gave him direct exposure to both the atmospheric traditions of German Romantic landscape and the classical Italian countryside that had inspired generations of European painters.

Whittredge returned to the United States in 1859 and settled in New York, joining the community of American landscape painters gathered around the Hudson River School. His mature work characteristically featured quiet eastern woodland interiors, coastal scenes along Long Island and Rhode Island, and gently observed pastoral views of the American countryside. His paintings combine the atmospheric warmth he had absorbed during his European years with a distinctly American sensitivity to the specific character of the American landscape.

In 1866 Whittredge traveled west with General John Pope's military expedition through the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, producing an important body of paintings of the western landscape that placed him alongside Bierstadt and Thomas Moran among the significant American painters of the West. He served as president of the National Academy of Design from 1874 to 1877, one of the highest recognitions available to an American painter of his era. Late in life Whittredge wrote his celebrated Autobiography, an invaluable primary document of nineteenth-century American painting. His pictures are held today in the Metropolitan Museum, the National Gallery, and other major American collections.