Thomas Worthington Whittredge

Artist Biography

In 1866, Thomas Worthington Whittredge traveled with Major General John Pope, commander of the Military Division of the Missouri, from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas through the Great Plains to the Rocky Mountains before ending in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Evening Along the Platte River may have been a sketch from this journey as Whittredge created more than forty sketches and paintings from his three trips west – the latter being in 1870 with fellow painters Sanford Gifford and John Frederick Kensett. “I had never seen the plains or anything like them. They impressed me deeply. I cared more for them than for the mountains, and very few of my western pictures have been produced from sketches made in the mountains, but rather from those made on the plains with the mountains in the distance. Whoever crossed the plains at that period, notwithstanding its herds of buffalo and flocks of antelope, its wild horses, deer and fleet rabbits, could hardly fail to be impressed with its vastness and silence and the appearance everywhere of an innocent, primitive existence.” – Worthington Whittredge, in The Autobiography of  Worthington Whittredge, 1820–1910