Google Lens entry:

This landscape presents a view in the Harz Mountains, the northernmost range in Germany. Whittredge traveled there in the summer of 1852, accompanied by the German painter Carl Freidrich Lessing, a teacher at the Düsseldorf Academy. A late-summer sketching trip was part of a landscape painter's life in Düsseldorf, and Whittredge participated in the ritual annually, making drawings of the local countryside.

Born in a log cabin in Ohio, Worthington Whittredge traveled to Germany in 1849 to study painting with Emanuel Leutze at the Düsseldorf Academy. He remained in Europe for ten years before returning to the United States, settling in New York City and becoming a major figure of the Hudson River School. Despite living in a major city, Whittredge returned again and again to the subject of American landscapes and forest interiors.

Worthington Whittredge (1820-1910) From the Harz Mountains (Riders in the Harz Mountains), 1853 Oil on canvas Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd 1989.8

Born in a log cabin in Ohio, Worthington Whittredge traveled to Germany in 1849 to study painting with Emanuel Leutze at the Düsseldorf Academy. He remained in Europe for ten years before returning to the United States, settling in New York City. Whittredge later expressed doubts about the value of foreign study for an American artist:

It was then, is now, and probably always will be a question whether our students going abroad to study art, are likely to make better artists than if they stayed home. Frankly, I doubt the desirability of long foreign study. A flying visit across the water is not objectionable but rather to be commended. But to go abroad and to become so fascinated with the art life in Paris and other great centers as to take up permanent abode there is not everywhere believed to be the best thing for an American artist.

Worthington Whittredge, The Autobiography of Worthington Whittredge, ed. John I. H. Baur (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum of Art, 1942), 30-40