"[1] A bit later, the essayist and critic Lewis Mumford wrote that Whorf's paintings "are perhaps the finest example of current realism one can find anywhere, not excepting the water colors of Hopper.

He traveled to Europe while still in his teens, there establishing his preference for watercolors over oils, and returned with enough work to stage his first solo exhibitions.

But he has an eye for wet vistas of city streets, houses and trees by day and night with intricate play of shadows, and the hunter or angler going about his pursuits.

"[4] Critics called attention to Whorf's skill as a colorist, the artistry of his compositions, his "free and bold brushwork", and a gift he was seen to possess to convey "vital human interest".

[7]: 67, 209  During the summer months of 1917 and 1918, he worked under the landscape artist George Elmer Browne and the figurative painter Richard Miller.

[10] For six summers, beginning in 1917, Whorf painted with the portraitist and noted teacher Charles Webster Hawthorne, from whom he later said he gained "an appreciation of the overwhelming beauty of light and color.

[7]: 67  In 1924, a reviewer for The Boston Globe said Whorf's paintings showed the influence of his Provincetown teachers and the artists he met there.

Held in January 1924 in the Grace Horne Gallery, this show received lengthy reviews in two local papers, The Christian Science Monitor and The Boston Globe, and a short notice in the national weekly ARTnews.

The Monitor critic noted Whorf's preference for watercolors and praised "the utter simplicity of manner in which the artist achieves sunny atmosphere.

"[16] The critic for the Globe said the show was an unusually successful one, producing record-breaking sales and declaring that "it was apparent at once that here was a new personality in painting—as fearless in the use of color as a Russian, or a Modern, but sound in technical fundamentals.

[note 1] In reviewing the 1926 Horne exhibition, a journalist said the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston had purchased a painting, as had some of its trustees.

[3] In 1931, a critic for the Christian Science Monitor said this last of the Boston solos "in many respects was the most successful this brilliant pupil of Sargent has yet held.

"[24][note 2] Whorf held his first solo in New York in 1926 when the Milch Galleries showed his work for the first of what would prove to be many occasions between then and the year before his death in 1959.

[note 3] Of the show held in 1929, Lloyd Goodrich said, "Mr. Whorf, although he is still under 30, is perhaps the most brilliant watercolorist in America today, if we take "brilliancy" to mean a breath-taking skill in depicting reality.

"[1] Regarding the Milch exhibition of 1930, a writer for Art Digest wrote that many reviewers of Whorf's watercolors considered him a successor to John Singer Sargent.

[34] In reviewing the previous year's show, Goodrich had made this thought explicit, saying, "The mantle of John Singer Sargent has certainly fallen upon Mr. Whorf; he already has as much sheer ability of hand and eye, as great a power of making his brush catch the illusive effects of reality with a minimum of apparent effort.

[29][30] In 1927, organizers of the Seventh Annual Invitational Exhibition of Watercolors at the Art Institute of Chicago gave Whorf a gallery to himself in which he showed twenty-two paintings.

[38] In the post-war years, as abstract expressionism began to gain traction, Howard Devree wrote: "The sternness of advanced taste may object to [Whorf's] prettification of what he sees, but there is no denying his skill nor the sense of serenity that his work exudes.

"[31] In the year before Whorf's death, Stuart Preston placed him within a group of realist painters who were able to succeed despite the influence of what he called the "advance guard".

As in the past, John Whorf's watercolors, a new selection of which is at the Milch Galleries, 21 East Sixty-seventh Street, reveal him as a master illustrator."

[11] In his watercolors, he used a "free and bold" technique according to one observer, and tended to use a full brush to insure purity and clarity of color.

[29] He was also said to control his wet color well, in order to take effective advantage of "inevitable accidentals" and cannily use white paper for highlights.

[21] In 1926, an unnamed critic described aspects of Whorf's realist style as follows: He is an impressionist–as are most moderns–and yet there is nothing vague, nothing hesitating, nothing left indistinct through fear of the inability to render it truthfully.

He paints, however, in his studio—away from all the actual form and color—working mostly from memory, because he feels that too close an application to any model results in confusion.He was credited with "an amazing breadth of artistic sympathies".

He explained his preference for watercolor by saying he "could not get the same rapidity of color in an oil,"[5] Remembering his first trip to Europe, he wrote: "Strange how it happened.

"[7]: 210 Whorf also once wrote that of the old masters he most admired Valasquez and Rembrandt and of modern artists Whistler, Renoir, Degas, Monet, Manet, Sargent, and Homer.

[7]: 69  He was prolific, regularly producing enough new work to fill his annual solos and other exhibitions, and had, as one critic said, "a bold assurance in his chosen medium.

His father, Harry Church Whorf (1874–1934), was head of the art department at a Boston printing firm called Oxford Press.

The two brothers, like Whorf himself, benefited from their parents' "great intellectual curiosity" (as one source put it), that they encouraged in their sons.

[39] His son Michael said family members used the euphemism "lame" to refer to his disability and variously ascribed the cause as the result of a childhood fall or one of two diseases, poliomyelitis or transverse myelitis.