Sanford Robinson Gifford

1823 - 1880

Death-PlaceNew York, NY

Birth-PlaceGreenfield, NY

BiographySanford Robinson Gifford (1823-1880)

Sanford Gifford, the fourth of Elihu and Eliza Robinson Starbuck Gifford's eleven children, was born in 1823 in Greenfield, Saratoga County, New York. He grew up in Hudson, New York, where his father ran a profitable iron foundry. Raised in an affluent and cultured household, he spent two years at Brown University, before dedicating himself to art.

In 1844 Gifford moved to New York in order to study with John Rubens Smith, author of an important drawing manual, “A Key to the Art of Drawing the Human Figure” (1831). Supplementing this instruction with study from the antique at the National Academy of Design and anatomy lessons at the Crosby Street Medical College, Gifford seemed destined for a career in portraiture until several walking tours in the Catskill and Berkshire Mountains turned his attention to nature. Although he received no formal training in landscape painting, Gifford began to exhibit his views of New England scenery at the National Academy of Design, where he was elected an associate in 1851 and an academician in 1854.

In celebration of this accomplishment, Gifford embarked upon an extended tour of Europe, visiting England, France, Switzerland, Italy, and Germany from 1855 to 1857. He met John Ruskin, who encouraged him to study the paintings of James Mallord William Turner, and met Jean-François Millet, who introduced him to the landscape artists working at Barbizon. Upon his return to New York, Gifford took a studio in the Tenth Street Studio Building and became known as one of the most poetic of the Hudson River School painters. His mature work is characterized by the use of an atmospheric veil of light and color, which unifies his compositions with an overall luminist glow.

Gifford is one of the few American landscape painters who actively participated in the Civil War, serving as a member of the Seventh Regiment of the New York State National Guard. In 1868 he made a second, shorter trip to Europe, extending his travels to Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Greece, and Turkey. He also traveled with Worthington Whittredge and John F. Kensett to the Colorado Rockies, where he joined the Ferdinand V. Hayden surveying expedition to Wyoming in 1870. Four years later he returned to the West, visiting California, Oregon, British Columbia, and Alaska. Gifford married in 1877. In 1880 he returned from a trip with his wife to Lake Superior with malaria and pneumonia. His sudden death at age fifty-seven was greatly mourned by members of the New York art establishment, who organized an impressive memorial exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and published a catalogue raisonné of his paintings.

“The White Mountains (Mount Washington from the Saco)”, 1871
Oil on canvas, 9 x 14 3/4 in. (22.9 x 37.5 cm)
Stephen B. Lawrence Fund (1977.19)
Signed (lower left): “S R Gifford 71”

This view of Mount Washington looking north from the Saco River is one of several that Gifford completed during the course of his career. Ila Weiss, in her 1987 monograph on the artist, pointed out the similarity in subject and size of this painting and a work in the 1881 catalogue raisonné called “The White Mountains”, thus prompting a return to the less geographically specific title. (1) Gifford produced his landscapes in his New York studio from sketches drawn during his summer travels, and it was not uncommon for him to complete a series of similar subjects of various sizes.

“The White Mountains” combines the sublimity of a snow-peaked mountain in the background with a tranquil foreground of cows drinking from the edge of the river. Artists began traveling to New Hampshire for subject matter as early as 1827, when Thomas Cole visited in the autumn of that year, and Mount Washington, the highest of the Presidential Peaks, often graced their canvases. Both writers and artists extolled the artistic possibilities of the White Mountains, and Asher B. Durand specifically noted the region's natural synthesis of the sublime and the beautiful in a letter to “The Crayon”: "The region of the White Mountains is justly famed for its impressive scenery; passages of the sublime and beautiful are not infrequent," he wrote in 1855. (2) In “The White Mountains”, Gifford effectively combined these two landscape formulas in a single canvas.

The painting depicts the region during autumn, when temperatures are crisp, leaves turn orange, and sunny skies are almost cloudless. The canvas is evenly divided into three horizontal bands, and the cows in the foreground stand immediately below the centrally positioned summit of the mountain. A strong, reflective light fills the canvas, and a golden glow suffuses the composition. John F. Weir, in a eulogistic address delivered shortly after Gifford's untimely death, recalled that "Gifford loved the light. His finest impressions were those derived from the landscape when the air is charged with an effulgence of irruptive and glowing light." (3) Gifford's love of light, emphatically expressed in “The White Mountains”, has led to his reputation as the most poetic of the luminist painters.

MEB
Bibliography:
John F. Weir, “A Memorial Catalogue of the Paintings of Sanford Robinson Gifford, N.A”., exhib. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1881); Nicolai Cikovsky Jr., “Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823-1880)”, exhib. cat. (Austin: University of Texas Art Museum, 1970); Ila Weiss, “Poetic Landscape: The Art and Experience of Sanford R. Gifford” (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987).

Notes:

Weiss, Poetic Landscape: p.215
2. Barbara J. MacAdam, "`A Proper Distance from the Hills': Nineteenth-Century Landscape Painting in North Conway" in Robert L. McGrath and Barbara J. MacAdam, "A Sweet Foretaste of Heaven": “Artists in the White Mountains” 1830-1930, exhib. cat. (Hanover, N.H.: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 1988), p. 26.
3. John F. Weir, "Sanford R. Gifford: His Life and Character as Artist and Man," ‘”Gifford Memorial Meeting of the Century” (New York: William C. Martin, 1880), p. 23.

Person Type(not assigned)