Art of the American West
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Worthington Whittredge (American, 1820–1910),
Long’s Peak, Colorado , 1866
oil on paper on canvas, 8 ¼ x 21 ½ in.; 20.96 x 54.61 cm
Museum purchase, 1965.58

Whittredge was one of the later Hudson River School landscape artists, whom he defined as painters of “more homely [than grandiose] scenery.” On his first trip West, in 1866, he followed the Platte River to central Colorado and then traveled south along the front range of the Rocky Mountains. The vistas he encountered on this trip were anything but “homely,” and they deeply impressed him: “I had never seen the plains or anything like them [and most of my pictures show them] with the mountains in the distance.” Whittredge made his field sketches, like Long’s Peak, on the spot, often on sheets of paper torn in half to give them the same horizontality as the plains.

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