Lot Essay
RELATED WORKS:
In the Rocky Mountains, oil on canvas, 14 3/8 x 20in., Harmsen Collection, Texas
A Mountain Trail, Colorado was painted by Worthington Whittredge after his first trip to the West in 1866. Accompanying General John Pope on a Western expedition, the artist travelled from Ft. Leavenworth following the Oregon Trail along the eastern Rocky Mountains and finally to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in New Mexico. Impressed by the vast and open plains, Whittredge created calm and quiet pictures with an emphasis on the horizontal expansion, contrasting greatly with the melodramatic and romantic landscapes of Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Church. Whittredge composed this picture accordingly--a long dirt path leads diagonally to a ledge of pines forming a median between the illuminated grassy foreground and a suggestive and hazy mountainous distance.
Whittredge's post-Civil War pictures such as A Mountain Trail, Colorado reveal a new relationship to nature which differ from his earlier studies in which nature served as a spiritual link between man and God. The cleared and manicured forest traversed by a covered wagon echoes an underlying theme in Whittredge's paintings of the late 1860s - "man can no longer abandon himself to nature; rather it is nature that will inevitably be lost to man." (A. Janson, Worthington Whittredge, Cambridge, 1989, p. 107)
In the Rocky Mountains, oil on canvas, 14 3/8 x 20in., Harmsen Collection, Texas
A Mountain Trail, Colorado was painted by Worthington Whittredge after his first trip to the West in 1866. Accompanying General John Pope on a Western expedition, the artist travelled from Ft. Leavenworth following the Oregon Trail along the eastern Rocky Mountains and finally to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in New Mexico. Impressed by the vast and open plains, Whittredge created calm and quiet pictures with an emphasis on the horizontal expansion, contrasting greatly with the melodramatic and romantic landscapes of Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Church. Whittredge composed this picture accordingly--a long dirt path leads diagonally to a ledge of pines forming a median between the illuminated grassy foreground and a suggestive and hazy mountainous distance.
Whittredge's post-Civil War pictures such as A Mountain Trail, Colorado reveal a new relationship to nature which differ from his earlier studies in which nature served as a spiritual link between man and God. The cleared and manicured forest traversed by a covered wagon echoes an underlying theme in Whittredge's paintings of the late 1860s - "man can no longer abandon himself to nature; rather it is nature that will inevitably be lost to man." (A. Janson, Worthington Whittredge, Cambridge, 1989, p. 107)