Thomas Waterman Wood was born in Montpelier, Vermont on November 12, 1823. While a boy he worked as an apprentice in his father’s cabinetmaking business during which the young Wood taught himself drawing from art manuals. He spent time in Boston living with relatives and while there may have studied briefly with the portrait painter Chester Harding.

By the late 1840s Wood painted portraits professionally in Vermont before opening a studio in New York City in 1852. With New York as his base he traveled throughout the eastern U.S. and Canada, in particular staying in Washington, DC, Baltimore and Quebec, fulfilling numerous commissions. Even though he experienced moderate financial success painting portraits he gradually moved toward genre or scenes from everyday life which also won the artist critical success.

This success led Wood to Paris, Rome and London in 1858 where he traveled and had studied the works of contemporaries as well as the old masters in the great museums and galleries.

The following year Wood returned to the United States first living in Nashville, Tennessee until 1862 then Louisville, Kentucky during the rest of the Civil War and eventually returning to New York in 1866. His time living and working in the South provided the artist with important subject matter. He executed a series of paintings of character types that included mainly Civil War soldiers and African Americans that secured his reputation. Wood was the first American painter to depict African Americans with grace and dignity. His enlightened approach won for him election to the prestigious National Academy of Design after this series was first exhibited in 1867.

He would continue primarily creating widely popular genre scenes that would depict urban and rural life in America during the late 19th century. The Kitten is a typical example of Wood’s larger vision within a smaller painting. The older man, smoking his pipe and perhaps taking a break from barn work, is presenting a little kitten to a young girl and boy. The sight of the small kitten is conjuring an almost magical and fantastic reaction from the children. The Kitten employs Wood’s mastery of draftsmanship, composition and light while capturing a scene of youthful wonderment: this can be observed in the detailed clothing and facial expressions.

Works such as The Kitten would make Wood one of the most financially successful artists of his era. In addition to painting he would serve the National Academy as an associate member, full member, instructor, vice-president and finally president from 1891-99. He was a founding member of the New York Etching Club and also president of the American Watercolor Society in New York. With the help of Columbia University professor John W. Burgess he founded the Wood Gallery of Art as a gift to his native Montpelier, Vermont. It would become the T.W. Wood Gallery and Art Center.

The works of Thomas Waterman Wood can be found in the following prestigious collections: T. W. Wood Gallery and Arts Center, Montpelier, VT; De Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; George Walter Vincent Smith Museum, Springfield, MA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, MN; Museum of Fine Arts-Springfield, Springfield, MA; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; New York Historical Society, New York, NY; New York State Historical Association/Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, NY; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; The Filson Historical Society, Inc., Louisville, KY; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.