One cannot help but notice the similarity between Thomas Worthington Whittredge's Trout Fishing jn the Adirondacks of ca. 1863 and John Frederick Kensett's View at Conway (link) of about twelve or thirteen years earlier. Both paintings are what may be called "interior" wooded scenes. The viewer stands within an enclosure of rocks, trees, and brush relatively near at hand. More specifically, both environments feature a stream, that rushes forward toward the viewer from the center recesses; both depict sunlight softly filtering through dense foliage; and both works are highly tactile. The presence of a fisherman at mid-ground in the Whittredge picture imparts a suggestion of the intimate scale.

That the two paintings are so alike may not seem too remarkable when one considers the artists were very good friends. (In 1866 and 1870 they traveled together, along with Stanford Gifford, on trips to the American West.) In that both men were enthralled with the nuance and intricacy of nature, they shared a common pictorial purpose. Whittredge, four years younger and largely self-taught, was doubtless influenced by the amiable and persuasive Kensett (link). More significant perhaps, both artists were aesthetic disciples of Asher B. Durand, a leading figure of the first-generation Hudson River School who innovated the close-up landscape.

Whittredge was born in a log cabin on a farm near Springfield, Ohio, in 1820. In 1837 he left home for Cincinnati, where first he worked as a house painter, advanced to sign painting, then to making daguerreotype photographs, and, still less than three years in the southern Ohio city, began portrait painting. About 1843 he turned to landscape. His earliest surviving paintings, from about 1845, already reflect the influence of Thomas Cole, Thomas Doughty (link), and most especially Durand, whom he had met and who had greatly encouraged his ongoing professional pursuit. Following the pattern of serious artists of the time, in 1849 he went to Europe, eventually settling in Düsseldorf, Germany. Though he never actually enrolled at the renowned Academy there, he studied independently with two of its masters, Emmanuel Leutze and Karl Friederich Lessing. After a sketching trip through Switzerland in 1854, he went on to Rome where he lived and worked for an additional five years. When he returned to the United States in 1859, he established himself in New York City and took a space in the Tenth Street Studio Building. He was elected to membership in the National Academy of Design in 1861, and he served as that organization's president first in 1865 and again from 1874 to '77.

Whittredge was an inveterate traveler and though his trips took him to the stupendous Alps of Europe and Rockies of America, like Kensett (link) he found them too grand, too immense. His favorite area always remained the Catskills. Never really fond of New York or other large cities, in 1880 Whittredge moved to the rural community of Summit, New Jersey. His landscapes from that time forth became somewhat richer and more tonal. From Summit he also began work on his Autobiography, which was published in 1905. It is not only a fascinating account of his own art, travels and experiences, but because it comments extensively on many artist associates, it also has become a valuable resource for students of the Hudson River School. Whittredge died in 1910, closing a life that spanned nine decades and a painting career that spanned seven.