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American painter (1823–1880) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sanford Robinson Gifford (July 10, 1823 – August 29, 1880) was an American landscape painter and a leading member of the second generation of Hudson River School artists. A highly-regarded practitioner of Luminism, his work was noted for its emphasis on light and soft atmospheric effects.
Sanford Robinson Gifford | |
|---|---|
Study for a Self-Portrait (c.1848), Brooklyn Museum | |
| Born | July 10, 1823 |
| Died | August 29, 1880 (aged 57) New York City, NY |
| Nationality | American |
| Known for | Landscape art, Painting |
| Movement | Luminism |
He was born in Greenfield, New York, the fourth of the eleven children of Quaker ironmaker Elihu Gifford and Eliza Robinson Starbuck.[1] He spent his childhood in Hudson, New York, and entered Brown University in 1842. He left college after his sophomore year, and moved to New York City in 1845 to study art. He studied drawing, perspective and anatomy under the British watercolorist and drawing-master, John Rubens Smith,[2] and took drawing classes at the National Academy of Design.[1] He also studied the human figure in anatomy classes at the Crosby Street Medical College.[1]
Although trained as a portrait painter, the first work Gifford exhibited at the National Academy was a landscape, in 1847.[3] Thereafter, Gifford devoted himself primarily to landscape painting, becoming one of the finest artists of the Hudson River School. He was elected an Associate of the National Academy in 1851, and an Academician in 1854.[3]
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Like most Hudson River School artists, Gifford traveled extensively to find scenic landscapes to sketch and paint. In addition to exploring New England, upstate New York and New Jersey, Gifford made extensive trips abroad. He first traveled to Europe from 1855 to 1857, to study European art and sketch subjects for future paintings. During this trip Gifford also met and traveled extensively with Albert Bierstadt and Worthington Whittredge.
In 1858, he traveled to Mount Mansfield, Vermont's tallest mountain, with his friend and fellow painter Jerome Thompson. Sketches made during their visit were published in the magazine Home Journal. Gifford painted some 20 paintings from the Vermont sketches. Of these, Mount Mansfield (1858) was his primary work, exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1859. Thompson also exhibited a painting of Mount Mansfield in same exhibition, Belated Party on Mansfield Mountain. Thompson's work is now owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.[4] (See "2008 NAD controversy," below.)
Gifford served as a corporal in the 7th Regiment of the New York Militia during the Civil War, guarding Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, 1861-1863.[5] A few of his canvases belonging to New York City's Seventh Regiment and the Union League Club of New York are testament to this troubled time.
During the summer of 1867, Gifford spent most of his time painting on the New Jersey coast, specifically at Sandy Hook and Long Branch, according to an auction Web site. The Mouth of the Shrewsbury River, one noted canvas from the period, is a dramatic scene depicting a series of telegraph poles extending into an atmospheric distance underneath ominous storm clouds.[6]
Another journey, this time with Jervis McEntee and his wife, took him across Europe in 1868. Leaving the McEntees behind, Gifford traveled to the Middle East, including Egypt in 1869. Then in the summer of 1870 Gifford ventured to the Rocky Mountains in the western United States, this time with Worthington Whittredge and John Frederick Kensett. At least part of the 1870 travels were as part of a Hayden Expedition, led by Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden.[7]
Mr. Gifford's method is this: When he sees anything which vividly impresses him, and which therefore he wishes to reproduce, he makes a little sketch of it in pencil on a card about as large as an ordinary visiting-card. It takes him, say, half a minute to make it; there is the idea of the future picture fixed as firmly if not as fully as the completed work itself. While traveling, he can in this way lay up a good stock of material for future use. The next step is to make a larger sketch, this time in oil, where what has already been done in black-and-white is repeated in color. To this sketch, which is about twelve inches by eight, he devotes an hour or two. It serves the purpose of defining to him just what he wants to do. He experiments with it; puts in or leaves out, according as he finds that he can increase or perfect his idea. When satisfactorily finished, it is a model of what he proposes to do.
He is now ready to paint the picture itself. When the day comes, he begins work just after sunrise, and continues until just before sunset. Ten, eleven, twelve consecutive hours, according to the season of the year, are occupied in the first great effort to put the scene on canvas. He feels fresh and eager. His studio-door is locked. Nothing is allowed to interrupt him.
When the long day is finished and the picture is produced, the work of criticism, of correction, of completion, is in place. Mr. Gifford does this work slowly. He likes to keep his picture in his studio as long as possible. Sometimes he does not touch the canvas for months after his first criticisms have been executed. Then, suddenly, he sees something that will help it along. I remember hearing him say one day, in his studio: "I thought that picture was done half a dozen times. It certainly might have been called finished six months ago. I was working at it all day yesterday." But one limitation should be noted here. Mr. Gifford does not experiment with his paintings. He does not make a change in one of them unless he knows precisely what he wishes to do. When Mr. Gifford is done, he stops. And he knows when he is done. Yet, on the other hand, he would rather take the risk of destroying a picture than to feel the slightest doubt respecting any part of it. The moment of his keenest pleasure is not when his work is satisfactorily completed, but when, long beforehand, he feels that he is going to be successful with it.[8]
Gifford would often revisit an image later, sometimes years later, painting a variation based on his sketches and own inspiration, or a patron's wishes.
Thirty-six Venice paintings, based on his 1869 drawings and studies of the city, were listed in the 1881 memorial catalogue of Gifford's works. He painted additional Venetian works, according to biographer Ila Weiss. In 1875, he wrote to a friend: "I have painted so many Venetian pictures during the last five years that I have lately declined to paint them when they have been asked for. One can't stay in Venice forever any more than one can eat partridge every day."[9] In the same letter, he wrote about his commission fees: "The price of such a picture the size of the [Fishing Boats Entering the Harbor of] Brindisi is $1600 without the frame. That is the price I received for the Brindisi, [Lake] Geneva, and [Mount] Renier [sic] [- Bay of Tacoma].[9]
Gifford enclosed "A List of Some of My Chief Pictures" in a November 6, 1874 letter to Octavius Brooks Frothingham. He updated that list in 1880.[10] Many of these works were characterized by a hazy atmosphere with soft, suffused sunlight. He often painted a large body of water in the foreground or middle distance, in which the distant landscape would be gently reflected.[11]
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In June 1877, at age 53, Gifford married Mary Cecilia Canfield (1824-1887), the widow of a friend. They had no children.
On August 29, 1880, Gifford died in New York City, after having been diagnosed with malarial fever. That autumn, the Metropolitan Museum of Art organized a memorial exhibition of 160 of his works.
The Gifford collection comprises nearly 70 pictures, and enough studies for pictures to bring the total up to 160 numbers. It occupies the entire west gallery. While the limited time allowed for the formation of the collection and the inconvenient season for securing loans prevented that completeness of representation which was desired, yet enough has been gathered to exhibit successfully the extent, the beauty, and the real power of Mr. Gifford's work, as well as its defects and limitations. Among the more important pictures that are displayed may be noted Twilight in the Wilderness (1861), Kauterskill Clove (1863), Mansfield Mountain (1868), The Mouth of the Shrewsbury (1868), Sta. Maria della Salute (1870), Tivoli (1870), San Giorgio (1870), A Venetian Twilight (1878), The Matterhorn at Sunrise (1879), The Parthenon (1880), and Venice (1880).[12]
The following year, MMA published a catalog of his works, which listed 734 paintings and featured an appraisal of his work by his friend, John F. Weir of Yale University:[13]
Mr. S. R. Gifford was represented [at the 1876 Centennial Exposition] by his Sunrise on the Sea-Shore, of which it may be said that the sea and its solitude has seldom inspired a more profound motive, or one more adequately rendered, than this picture. Tivoli and Lake Geneva are no less admirable, but with a very distinct sentiment, and Pallanza, Lago Maggiore has a full-blooded sense of light, modified by tone that is in every respect masterly in treatment. Two pictures by the same artist, Fishing-Boats of the Adriatic and San Giorgio, Venice, are as strong and pronounced in color as the former works are delicate and suggestive. The artist is varied in his powers, and sustained, free, and finished in his methods. His pictures always manifest great elevation of thought and feeling. They are the interpretation of the profound sentiments of Nature rather than of her superficial aspects.[14]
Two-hundred-ninety-four of Gifford's paintings were to be auctioned at Madison Square Garden in two sessions.[15] Part 1 went off without a hitch, but Part 2 had a tragic end.
The same lesson is also enforced by the sale of the pictures and sketches of the late Sanford R. Gifford, the most important sale, so far as American art in concerned, held in a long while. The collection consisted of 294 sketches and finished works, which were sold in two divisions, on the evenings of April 11th and 12th, and 28th and 29th, and realized an aggregate $42,200. The highest price was paid for the finished picture, The Ruins of the Parthenon, which was bought for the Corcoran Gallery of Art, at Washington, for $5,100.[16]
The preview for the second session, on the evening of April 21, was advertised as a benefit for New York City's Hahnemann Hospital. The crowd was larger than anticipated, and with some 800 people packed into the building, the floor of the ballroom collapsed, in what became known as the Madison Square Garden disaster. Five people were killed and twenty-two were injured.[17]
Between 1955 and 1973, Gifford's heirs donated the artist's letters and personal papers to the Archives of American Art, at the Smithsonian Institution. In 2007, these papers were digitally scanned in their entirety and made available to researchers as the Sanford Robinson Gifford Papers Online.[18] Twenty-four of Gifford's sketchbooks survive, and are in the collections of Yale University, the Brooklyn Museum, Vassar College, and elsewhere.
In December 2008, one of Gifford's paintings, Mount Mansfield, Vermont (1859), became part of a controversy over deaccessioning by the National Academy of Design.[4] The Academy was a member of the Association of Art Museum Directors, whose policy stated that member museums could not sell works of art to cover operating expenses, only to purchase superior works or to weed out inferior or redundant ones. Prior to joining AAMD, the Academy had sold two Thomas Eakins works (including his "diploma painting," Wrestlers) in the 1970s, and Richard Caton Woodville's War News from Mexico (1848) in 1994.[19] According to its former curator, David Dearinger: "When the Academy later applied to the museum association for accreditation, Mr. Dearinger recalled, it was asked about the Woodville sale and promised not to repeat such a move."[20]
In a 2008 sale, the Academy quietly sold Frederic Edwin Church‘s Scene on the Magdalene (1854) and Sanford Gifford's Mount Mansfield, Vermont (1859) to a private collector for US$13.5 million.[4] The former was the Academy's only painting by Church; the latter was its only painting by Gifford. Both had been "donated to the Academy in 1865 by another painter, James Augustus Suydam."[21] News of the sale was broken by arts blogger Lee Rosenbaum.[22] As punishment for these actions, AAMD asked its other member museums to "cease lending artworks to the Academy and collaborating with it on exhibitions."[21] The Academy had contemplated selling additional paintings, but those plans were abandoned after being reported by Rosenbaum.[23]
NOTE: Gifford's "Chief Pictures" are listed in bold.
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