Morning in the Hudson, Haverstraw Bay

Morning in the Hudson, Haverstraw Bay is one of numerous paintings by Sanford Gifford showing the Hudson River north of New York City, a region that was not only the artist’s birthplace but the inspiration for the development of America’s first native movement in landscape painting, the Hudson River school. The painting is one of a pair of works, both based on sketches made in a short period in September of 1866, of views looking north and south from points located within several miles of each other on the eastern shore of the river.  Looking diagonally across the river northwest from Ossining, New York, in the immediate vicinity of Sing-Sing penitentiary, Morning in the Hudson, Haverstraw Bay focuses on High Tor, a mountain rising eight hundred feet above the river at Haverstraw, New York. The irregular string of sails on the horizon and the nearer shad boat, with its relatively strong color, are counterpoints for the still perfection of water, sky, and light; these vessels also hint at the activity that made the Hudson River one of the nation’s most vital avenues of commerce, terminating in a mighty urban harbor a mere forty miles downstream.

For Gifford, however, landscape painting concerned serene, glowing light and atmosphere as much as the land itself. To emphasize them, Gifford often sited distant vistas beyond broad bodies of water with smooth, reflective surfaces.  In several works from the late 1860s and 1870s, the distant landfall is reduced to a mere sliver in relation to water and sky. Morning in the Hudson, Haverstraw Bay is among the earliest of several such compositions showing the Hudson River. By choosing a viewpoint where the river is at its widest—three miles from shore to shore—and aggrandizing the distance by looking diagonally across the river, Gifford presents the Hudson as a lake-like, static body rather than a powerfully moving stream.  This emphatically horizontal composition is dominated by unbounded expanses of still water and calm sky, united by a diffused, cool morning light that imposes an exquisite tranquility on the scene.

Gifford’s paintings of Italian lake scenery executed during or after his first trip to Italy in the mid-1850s provided a precedent for Morning in the Hudson, Haverstraw Bay and similar Hudson River scenes. Gifford’s encounter with the Italian landscape was informed by his study of English romantic artist J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), who used expressive, glowing color in his many paintings in which water—lakes, rivers, and seas—figure prominently. Morning in the Hudson, Haverstraw Bay’s composition, palette, brushwork, and mood, however, belong firmly within a contemporary trend in American landscape painting, dubbed “luminism” by modern scholars, that favored low, horizontal, shoreline themes interpreted with insistent purity, simplicity, and luminous serenity. Another example of this mode from the Terra Foundation collection, Francis Silva’s On the Hudson Near Haverstraw (TF 1993.16), shows a closely related scene; it too was painted in 1872.

Seventh Annual Exhibition, Artists' Fund Society, New York, at the National Academy of Design, New York, New York, 1866, no. 40.

Forty-fourth Annual Exhibition, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, April 22–June 1, 1867, no. 82.

Memorial Exhibition, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York, October 1880–March 1881, no. 101 (as Morning on the Hudson).

Collection Cameo, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, March 1995.

Permanent collection installation, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, April 12–August 27, 1997.

Rivières et rivages: les artistes américains, 1850–1900 (Waves and Waterways: American Perspectives, 1850–1900), Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France (organizer). Venue: Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France, April 1–October 31, 2000. [exh. cat.]

Permanent collection installation, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, December 9–February 11, 2001.

Ships at Sea: Sailing Through Summer, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, June 6–August 26, 2001.

D'une colonie à une collection: le Musée d'Art Américain Giverny fête ses dix ans (From a Colony to a Collection: Celebrating the Tenth Anniversary of the Musée d'Art Américain Giverny), Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France (organizer). Venue: Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France, March 30–June 16, 2002.

A Place on the Avenue: Terra Museum of American Art Celebrates 15 Years in Chicago, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, November 16, 2002–February 16, 2003.

American Classics from the Collection, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, May 14–June 15, 2003.

Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York and National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (organizer). Venues: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York, October 8, 2003–February 8, 2004; Amon Carter Museum of Art, Fort Worth, Texas, March 6–May 16, 2004; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., June 27–September 26, 2004. [exh. cat.]

Expanded Galleries of American Art with Loans from the Terra Foundation for American Art Collection, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, April 15, 2005–November 2018.

Once Upon a Time in America: Three Centuries of US American Art (Es war einmal in Amerika: 300 Jahre Us-Amerikanishe Kunst), Wallraf-Richartz Museum & Fondation Corboud, Cologne, Germany (organizer). Venue: Wallraf-Richartz Museum & Fondation Corboud, Cologne, Germany, November 23, 2018–March 24, 2019. [exh. cat.]

"Art Matters: Artists' Fund Society Exhibition." American Art Journal 6 (1866): 103.

A Memorial Catalogue of the Paintings of Sanford Robinson Gifford, N.A. (exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art). New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1881. No. 685, p. 44.

"Sale of the Whitney Collection." The New York Times (December 15, 1885): 3.

Catalogue of the Collection of Modern Paintings, Etc., Formed by the Late Mr. George Whitney of Philadelphia. New York: American Art Association, 1885. Text pp. 10, 36, no. 71.

Weiss, Ila Joyce. Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823–1880) . PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 1968. Text p. 272.

Weiss, Ila Joyce. Poetic Landscape: The Art and Experience of Sanford R. Gifford. Newark, Delaware: University of Delaware Press, 1986. No. 426, p. 32.

Morning in the Hudson, Haverstraw Bay, Sanford Robinson Gifford. Collection Cameo sheet, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, March 1995. Ill. (black & white).

Cartwright, Derrick R. Waves and Waterways: American Perspectives, 1850–1900. (exh. cat., Musée d'Art Américain Giverny). Chicago, Illinois: Terra Foundation for the Arts, 2000. Text p. 26 (checklist); ill. cover (color).

Cartwright, Derrick R. Rivières et rivages: les artistes américains, 1850–1900. (exh. cat., Musée d'Art Américain Giverny). Chicago, Illinois: Terra Foundation for the Arts, 2000. Text p. 26 (checklist); ill. cover (color).

Avery, Kevin J. and Franklin Kelly, eds. Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford. (exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art). New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003. Text pp. 29, 46, 179, 183, 190, 191, 200; ill. no. 42, p. 180 (color).

Pollack, Lindsay. "American Splendor." Art and Auction (December 2003): 108, 110. Text p. 110; ill. p. 108 (color).

Bourguignon, Katherine M., and Peter John Brownlee, eds. Conversations with the Collection: A Terra Foundation Collection Handbook. Chicago: Terra Foundation for American Art, 2018. Text p. 72; ill. p. 72 (color).

Schaefer, Barbara and Anita Hachmann, eds. Es War Einmal in Amerika: 300 Jahre US-Amerikanische Kunst. (exh. cat. Wallraf-Richartz Museum). Köln: Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud. Text pp. 358; ill. p. 359 (color).