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©
Carmen Thyssen Collection
Worthington Whittredge

The Rainbow, Autumn, Catskill

ca. 1880 - 1890
Oil on canvas.
29.2 x 42.8 cm
Carmen Thyssen Collection
Inv. no. (
CTB.1999.114
)
Not on display
  • Level 2 Permanent Collection
  • Level 1 Permanent Collection
  • Level 0 Carmen Thyssen Collection and Temporary exhibition rooms
  • Level -1 Temporary exhibition rooms, Conference room and EducaThyssen workshop
Level 2
Permanent Collection
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 14 13 15 16 17 18 22 19 20 21 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 Recommended start of the visitClassical rooms
1 14th Century. Early Italian Painting 2 15th Century. German and Spanish Painting 3 15th Century. Early Netherlandish Painting 4 15th Century. Italian Painting 5 15th and 16th Centuries. Renaissance Portraiture 6 16th Century. Villahermosa Gallery 7 16th Century. Italian Painting 8 15th and 16th Centuries. German Painting 9 15th and 16th Centuries. German Painting 10 16th Century. Netherlandish Painting 11 Tiziano, Tintoretto, Bassano and  El Greco 12 17th Century. Caravaggio and Baroque Painting 13 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 14 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 15 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 16 18th Century. Italian Painting 17 18th Century. Italian Painting 18 18th Century. Italian Painting 19 Classical rooms 20 Classical rooms 21 Classical rooms 22 18th Century. Italian Painting 23 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 24 18th Century. French and English Painting 25 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Scenes of Daily Life and Interiors 26 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 27 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Portrait 28 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 29 19th Century. European Painting. Goya and Romanticism  
Level 1
Permanent Collection
30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 Postpop rooms Rodin room
30 18th and 19th Centuries. Transatlantic Relations 31 19th Century. American Landscape and Environmental Awareness 32 19th Century. American Landscape and Urban Life 33 Recovering the ligth. Restoration of Waterloo Bridge, by André Derain 34 20th Century. Expressionist Landscapes 35 20th Century. Expressionist Portraits 36 20th Century. The Language of the Body 37 20th Century. Urban unrest 38 20th Century. Flowers 39 20th Century. Pioneers of abstraction 40 20th Century. Popular flavor 41 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition I 42 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition II 43 20th Century. Abstract Utopias 44 20th Century. Dada and Surrealism 45 20th Century. Interwar Realisms 46 20th Century. American Abstraction I 48 20th Century. Post-ward American Art 49 20th Century. Post-ward European Figurative Art 50 20th Century. Informalisms 51 20th Century. Homo Ludens 52 20th Century. Pop Art 53 Postpop rooms 54 Postpop rooms 55 Postpop rooms 56 Postpop rooms Rodin Exhibition room
Level 0
Carmen Thyssen Collection and Temporary exhibition rooms
A B C D E F G H I J Hall Temporary exhibition rooms Access to Permanent Collection Entrance Access to Carmen Thyssen Collection Paseo del Prado Garden
A 17th and 18th Centuries. Old Masters B 19th Century. North American Landscape C 19th Century. French Naturalist Landscape D 19th Century. Impressionism E 19th Century. Monet and North American Impressionism F 19th Century. Gauguin and Postimpressionism G 19th and 20th Centuries. Neo Impressionism and its Wake H 20th Century. Early Avant-gardes I 20th Century. Between the Wars Painting. Cubism, Abstraction and Surrealism J 20th Century. North American Painting and Others • HALL
Level -1
Temporary exhibition rooms, Conference room and EducaThyssen workshop
Temporary exhibition rooms Conference room EducaThyssen Workshop
Worthington Whittredge, unlike most of the painters associates with the Hudson River School, received his training in Europe from artists associated with the Düsseldorf Academy in Germany. His development as an artist was influenced by Andreas Achenbach, Carl Friedrich Lessing, and Johann Schirmer. Returning to America in 1859, Whittredge was acutely aware of the differences between the landscapes of the Old World and America. He visited The New York Historical Society shortly after landing in New York and saw that the landscapes of the established American painters, especially the works of Asher B. Durand, differed from the European models on which his art had been built. And the physical American landscape, he quickly re-discovered on a sketching excursion to the Catskills, was also far different from the terrain he had experienced in Europe. "The forest was a mass of decaying logs and tangled brush wood, no peasants to pick up every vestige of fallen sticks to burn in their miserable huts, no well-ordered forests, nothing but the primitive woods with their solemn silence reigning everywhere." Whittredge realised that if he were to succeed as an American painter, he must "produce something new and which might claim to be inspired by my home surroundings." In his 1867 evaluation of the artist, Henry T. Tuckerman, America's foremost art critic at mid-19th-century, agreed that with the artist's rediscovery of the unique qualities of the American landscape, he found his distinct subject: "Worthington is a progressive artist; he acquired with the dexterity, some of the mannerism of the Düsseldorf school; but constant and loving study of nature, since his return from abroad, has modified this habitude; he is more original, and applies his skill with deeper sentiment; conscientiously devoted to his art, for manly fidelity to the simple verities of nature, no one of our painters is more consistently distinguished than Worthington Whittredge."

After journeying to the western United States in 1867-1870, where he was impressed by the vastness of the plains, Whittredge returned to painting the landscape of New England and the Catskill region of New York. In his forest interiors he gradually adopted a looser, more Barbizon manner, which was concerned with the mood and tonal qualities of the woodland landscapes. He felt that the Catskills displayed a variety of scenery with "peculiar characteristics" not found in other areas. This quality is found in The Rainbow, Autumn, Catskills, a quiet woodland scene, its autumnal tones intensified by a passing shower. Below a rainbow breaking through the cloudy sky, Mallard ducks are seen floating upon the placid stream. John Ferguson Weir wrote in 1876 that Whittredge's forest interiors which are "loose, free, sketchy, void of all that is rigid and formal" evince "a subtle sympathy with the suggestive and evanescent qualities of the landscape."

The motif of waterfowl in the centre foreground of his composition was used by Whittredge as early as 1864 in his painting, Duck Pond. On the other hand, a larger, almost exact replica of Rainbow, Autumn, Catskills, bearing the title The Rainbow, was dated 1901 by the artist. While it has been claimed this canvas was exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1875 as no. 445, After the Rain, there is no evidence to support this. Rather, the cursory, painterly treatment of The Rainbow, Autumn, Catskills -its title inscribed on the reverse of the canvas- suggests a date of the 1880s, a time Whittredge often returned to his woodland compositions of the 1870s.

Kenneth W. Maddox

19th Century19th Century - American painting. ImpressionismPaintingOilcanvas
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The Rainbow, Autumn, Catskill

The Rainbow, Autumn, Catskill

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Poster Richard Estes. Nedick's, 1970

Poster Richard Estes. Nedick's, 1970

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La máquina Magritte: Exhibition catalog (Spanish w. English texts)

La máquina Magritte: Exhibition catalog (Spanish w. English texts)

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Max Beckmann, figuras del exílio. Exhibition catalogue. Paperback Spanish language edition.

Max Beckmann, figuras del exílio. Exhibition catalogue. Paperback Spanish language edition.

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The Rainbow, Autumn, Catskill. El arco iris, otoño, Catskill, c. 1880-1890
The Rainbow, Autumn, Catskill
Worthington Whittredge

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The Rainbow, Autumn, Catskill. El arco iris, otoño, Catskill, c. 1880-1890
The Rainbow, Autumn, Catskill
Worthington Whittredge

©

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