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Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection THOMAS WORTHINGTON WHITTREDGE (1820-1910) Va...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:30,000.00 - 40,000.00 USD
Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection THOMAS WORTHINGTON WHITTREDGE (1820-1910) Va...
Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection
THOMAS WORTHINGTON WHITTREDGE
(1820-1910)
Valley of the Ocate, 1866
inscribed "Valley of the Ocate" with indistinct inscription (lower right) inscribed and dated "W.Whittredge 1865" on a period label (affixed on reverse)
oil on paper mounted on board
8 x 23 1/8 in. (20.3 x 58.7 cm) <p>Estimate: $30,000-40,000 <p>Provenance
Edgar P. Richardson, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Kennedy Galleries, Inc., New York Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Lugano, Switzerland, 1983 <p> Literature
Elizabeth Storm Nagy, Europa e America Dipinti e acquerelli dell'Ottocento e del Novecento dalla Collezione Thyssen-Bornemisza, Milan, 1993, p. 68, no. 47 (illustrated) <p> In the summer of 1866, Whittredge made his first trip to the American West, traveling with General John Pope as Pope examined the forts in his Department of the Missouri command. The expedition left Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, on June 1st, and, traveling along the Platte River, arrived in Denver by the end of the month. It then turned south, skirting the eastern slope of the Rockies on the way to Santa Fe, New Mexico. After several weeks in Santa Fe, where Whittredge met the memorable scout, Kit Carson, Pope's forces continued on to Albuquerque, and then, in late July, headed north along the Santa Fe Trail, finally arriving in Fort Riley, Kansas, in mid-August, after ten weeks of arduous travel. <p>All along the 2,000-mile route, Whittredge sketched the ever-varying landscape. We usually made a march of thirty-three miles a day, which was performed between daybreak and one o'clock in the afternoon. On arriving in camp I gave my horse to an orderly and went at once to the wagon for my sketch box. While the officers were lounging in their tents and awaiting their dinners, I went to make a sketch, seldom returning before sundown.1 <p> Most of these Western sketches were executed in oil on half sheets of paper, measuring roughly 10 by 25 inches, a format that Anthony Janson calls "ideal for capturing the horizontal sweep of the seemingly endless plains."2 Whittredge's intent in using this highly portable medium was to assemble a group of studies that he could later transform into larger paintings following his return to New York, but these sketches have long been admired in their own right for their immediacy and freshness. <p>Valley of the Ocate is one of the few sketches from this trip that Whittredge executed during the expedition's return to Kansas. After a brief second stop in Santa Fe, the party turned north along the Santa Fe Trail. General Pope wanted to spend a few days at Fort Union, a fort that he felt needed careful inspection. It was not until they had arrived at Fort Union that the artist finally received his first letters from home of the entire journey. "Among these letters," wrote Whittredge, "was one from a young lady I had long known and which I answered at more length than was my usual custom."3 (Whittredge was to marry that same young lady two years later.) <p>The following day, Whittredge left Fort Union in high spirits. Their next stop was the Ocate crossing, home to a stagecoach station, a cemetery, and little else. At the time of the expedition, the Ocate, a branch of the Canadian River, was thought to be a river, but since for most of the year it is a dry wash, its appellation has since been changed to "creek." Running along a flat, scrub-filled valley, the Ocate marks the beginning, as the trail continues north, of a sixty-mile long stretch of arid, ravine-filled country, a "llano estaccado" or "staked plain" that was the terror of travelers, particularly in July and August. <p>In painting Valley of the Ocate, however, Whittredge clearly leaves no hint of such a dismal prospect. Although the painting conveys the vastness and emptiness of the American Southwest, it does so in a space of cloud-filled skies and moving shadows, and in a palette of cool greens and blues as well as browns. Although the artist was sanguine by nature, in this instance his optimism may be traced to a specific event. <p>We would like to gratefully acknowledge the generous assistance of Dr. Anthony Janson, Professor, University of North Carolina, Wilmington, in providing provenance and other valuable information on this painting.
<p>We are grateful to Dr. Bruce Chambers for cataloguing this lot. <p> Notes 1 John I. H. Baur, ed., "The Autobiography of Worthington Whittredge, 1820-1910," MS, Archives of American Art, Brooklyn Museum Journal I, 1942, p. 45. 2 Anthony F. Janson, Worthington Whittredge, Cambridge, New York, Portchester, Melbourne and Sydney, 1989, p. 113. 2 John I. H. Baur, ed., "The Autobiography of Worthington Whittredge, 1820-1910," MS, Archives of American Art, Brooklyn Museum Journal I, 1942, p. 52.
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