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Sanford Robinson Gifford
1823–1880
BirthplaceGreenfield, New York, United States of America
Death placeNew York, New York, United States of America
BiographyOne of nineteenth-century America’s most accomplished landscape painters, Sanford Gifford painted intimate yet panoramic views of wide-ranging terrain saturated by sunlight and atmospheric color. Gifford was a native of Hudson, New York, the center of the region that inspired the Hudson River school, America’s first native school of landscape art. The works of the movement’s founder, Thomas Cole, who lived nearby, stimulated Gifford to take up landscape painting. In New York City, Gifford studied with drawing master John Rubens Smith (1775–1849) in 1845 and attended classes at the National Academy of Design, but he taught himself to paint landscapes by studying Cole’s paintings and sketching in the Catskill Mountains of New York and in Massachusetts’s Berkshire Mountains.
Gifford traveled in Europe from 1855 to 1857. He was deeply influenced by the landscapes of the old masters as well as the work of contemporary artists and the English romantic painters, such as J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851). However, this experience also left him determined to resist any tendency to let a school or manner “usurp the place of Nature.” Gifford developed an individual landscape vision by making natural light the main subject of his paintings; both panoramic in their scope and relatively small in physical size, they present pervasive glowing light as a unifying, almost mystical force. Gifford summarized his own art when he pronounced that “landscape painting is air painting.”
Like many of his contemporaries among American landscape painters, Gifford traveled widely throughout his career. In addition to almost annual sketching excursions throughout New England, he made repeated trips to Europe, toured the Near East, and visited the American West, the Canadian Pacific region, and Alaska. His paintings of these wide-ranging locales were highly popular and lucrative for him, but also esteemed by his fellow landscapists. Elected to an associate membership of New York’s prestigious National Academy of Design in 1851 and a full membership in 1854, Gifford was a popular figure among the city’s artists, particularly among his fellow tenants of the Tenth Street Studio Building, who included many of the most important landscapists of the day. After his sudden death at the age of fifty-seven, while on a trip to Lake Superior, Gifford was honored with a large retrospective exhibition of his work at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the first such exhibition in the institution’s history.
Gifford traveled in Europe from 1855 to 1857. He was deeply influenced by the landscapes of the old masters as well as the work of contemporary artists and the English romantic painters, such as J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851). However, this experience also left him determined to resist any tendency to let a school or manner “usurp the place of Nature.” Gifford developed an individual landscape vision by making natural light the main subject of his paintings; both panoramic in their scope and relatively small in physical size, they present pervasive glowing light as a unifying, almost mystical force. Gifford summarized his own art when he pronounced that “landscape painting is air painting.”
Like many of his contemporaries among American landscape painters, Gifford traveled widely throughout his career. In addition to almost annual sketching excursions throughout New England, he made repeated trips to Europe, toured the Near East, and visited the American West, the Canadian Pacific region, and Alaska. His paintings of these wide-ranging locales were highly popular and lucrative for him, but also esteemed by his fellow landscapists. Elected to an associate membership of New York’s prestigious National Academy of Design in 1851 and a full membership in 1854, Gifford was a popular figure among the city’s artists, particularly among his fellow tenants of the Tenth Street Studio Building, who included many of the most important landscapists of the day. After his sudden death at the age of fifty-seven, while on a trip to Lake Superior, Gifford was honored with a large retrospective exhibition of his work at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the first such exhibition in the institution’s history.