WORTHINGTON WHITTREDGE 1820-1910
Landscape Near Rome, 1858
Oil on canvas, 33 X 54" (83.82 x 137.16 cm.)
Signed, lower right
Museum purchase, 965-0-107

In 1849 Worthington Whittredge left Cincinnati, where he and William Sonntag had established a distinctive regional variant of the Hudson River school, for Europe. His avowed intention, unusual among American landscapists, was to find a teacher. Like many artists from the Midwest, he was essentially self-taught. Finding Paris too expensive and not being impressed by the Barbizon painters, he soon journeyed to Dusseldorf, where he remained for nearly seven years. In the autumn of 1856, after spending the summer sketching in Switzerland, he settled in Rome with Sanford R. Gifford and Albert Bierstadt. Although his friends left the following summer, Whittredge remained in Rome another two years. Whereas he had been well armed with commissions from Cincinnati patrons while in Germany, he was forced to turn to the open market in Rome. As he wrote in his autobiography: "The necessity of selling our work made us bestir ourselves in society, and in making the acquaintance of all the strangers we could, who had come to town." In this he seems to have been successful enough, for he was able to survive in reasonable comfort in a city legendary as one of the cheapest in all of Europe.
The works he painted for the tourist trade fall into two broad classes: Swiss scenes, mainly of Lake Lucerne, and standard picturesque views of the Roman Campagna. The Butler Institute painting, however, partakes of both. Long called Landscape Near Rome, it was executed when he spent the summer around Lake Albano and in the Sabine mountains. A slightly smaller variant, with different figures in the foreground, was called View of Lake Albano when it passed through auction in 1984. Nevertheless, the landscape does not look like the scenery to the south and east of Rome. If the artist intended to show that area, then he has transformed it completely to conform to his Swiss scenes, so that the Setting suggests instead a view in the alpine region of northern Italy. The figures, which are standard in Whittredge's European canvases, add a picturesque note. Their costumes further indicate that the locale may be northern Italy, as do the boats, which are indigenous to that area. This, interestingly enough, agrees with the views of the donor, who also regarded it as "probably of a lake in the Italian alps." The painting is similar in composition and style to Whittredge's pictures of Switzerland. Like them, it is horizontal in format, and keeps the mountains at a safe remove. He noted in his autobiography, "I never got into the way of measuring all grandeur in a perpendicular line .... " And like them, it is painted in the academic manner he had absorbed from Carl Friedrich Lessing, Andreas Achenbach, and Johann Schirmer in Dusseldorf, which had much in common with that of the Swiss school led by Francois Diday. It differs, however, in the darker tonality and freer execution. The artist must have regarded the canvas as especially successful, since, as noted above, he repeated it at least once, something that is quite rare in his oeuvre.

ANTHONY F. JANSON