Thomas Worthington Whittredge was born on May 22, 1820 in Springfield, Ohio where he was raised to become a hunter/trapper. He received little formal art training until his early patron, Nicholas Longworth, paid for him to go abroad in 1849. Prior to this, Whittredge moved to Cincinnati (where he eventually met Longworth), and worked in a sign painting shop. He then moved to Charlestown, West Virginia where he worked as a portrait artist, painting landscapes on the side. By 1843 he ceased to paint portraits, and concentrated solely on landscape painting, and in 1849 he departed for Europe for a decade. Upon arrival, he traveled around Belgium and Germany, sketching along the Rhine River. Although he claimed to be unimpressed by the Barbizon School painters, his mature style shows their influence. Whittredge enrolled at the Düsseldorf Royal Academy where he studied under Carl Lessing and Andreas Achenbach. During this time, Whittredge accompanied Albert Bierstadt on sketching trips he made to Westphalia. He was also one of several artists called upon by Emanuel Leutze to pose for his massive, Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY), but he was the only artist who modeled for the primary figure of Washington himself! After his time at the Royal Academy, Whittredge headed to Italy (via Switzerland), where there was an artist group had formed in Rome, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Frederic Edwin Church. In 1859 Whittredge returned to New York, and upon realising that his European landscapes were not selling as well as he had hoped for, he turned his focus to American landscapes. He focused primarily on Catskill, NY, White Mountain, NH and the Great Plains. He made a total of three trips out west, yielding about forty oil sketches and studio paintings. The first of the three trips he went with Major General John Pope, and the second he went with S.R. Gifford and J.F. Kensett. Between 1874 and 1877 Whittredge served as the President of the National Academy of Design, and in 1880 he built a home in Summit, New Jersey, where he died on February 25, 1910. His Washington Crossing the River Platte, 1871 hangs in the Roosevelt Room in The White House, and his works are represented in collections such as Cincinnati Art Museum, OH, Brooklyn Art Museum, NY, The Met, NY, and Newark Museum of Art, NJ.