Detail View: Visual Resources Teaching Collection: Berkshire Hills near Pittsfield, MA

aahi0000056

Berkshire Hills near Pittsfield, MA

full view

1862

Sanford Robinson Gifford (American, 1823-1880)

male

American painter. He grew up in Hudson, NY, and attended Brown University between 1842 and 1844. He moved to New York in 1845 and studied with the British watercolourist and drawing-master John Rubens Smith (1775–1849), who probably taught him portraiture and topographical rendering. Gifford also enrolled in figure drawing classes at the National Academy of Design and attended anatomy lectures at the Crosby Street Medical College. After a year studying the human figure, he decided to specialize in landscape painting. An admirer of the work of Thomas Cole, he took a sketching trip during the summer of 1846 and visited some of that artist's haunts in the Berkshire and Catskill Mountains. Gifford's earliest works show the combined influence of Cole's style and his own nature studies (e.g. Summer Afternoon, 1853; Newark, NJ, Mus.). He first exhibited his work at the National Academy of Design in 1847, the same year the American Art-Union accepted one of his landscapes for distribution through engraving to its members. The next year the Art-Union showed eight of Gifford's canvases. The National Academy elected him an associate in 1851 and an academician in 1854. Like most American landscape painters of his day, Gifford decided to supplement his training with European travel, and he left for England in 1855. There he studied the work of Turner and Constable. That autumn he went to France and spent over a year studying in Paris, Fontainebleau and Barbizon, where he was strongly impressed with the work of Jean-François Millet. Before returning home, he toured Germany, Switzerland and Italy, where Albert Bierstadt joined him. Paintings from this trip, such as the Lake of Nemi (1856–7; Toledo, OH, Mus. A.), reveal his departure from the dark hued, meticulous compositions of his Hudson river school predecessors, such as Cole, in favour of landscapes painted with barely noticeable brushstrokes and bathed in light that diffuses topographical detail. In the autumn of 1857 Gifford took a studio at the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York, where he painted for the rest of his life. On his annual summer trips, usually with fellow landscape painters, to the Catskills, the Adirondacks and a great variety of scenic locations in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, he made pencil sketches that he later developed into oil paintings. He favoured the Catskills and produced numerous paintings of the area. Kauterskill Clove (1862; New York, Met.; see fig.) is one of his finest works and shows the successful culmination of his experiments with the dissolution of form in atmospheric light. While serving in the Civil War, he produced such works as Bivouac of the Seventh Regiment at Arlington Heights, VA (1861; New York, Seventh Regiment Armory), in which his fascination with effects of light is equally apparent. Between summer 1868 and autumn 1869 Gifford visited Italy, Greece, Egypt, Syria, Jerusalem and other countries in the Near East. This trip inspired many of his later paintings, for example the Ruins of the Parthenon, 1868 (1880; Washington, DC, Corcoran Gal. A.). Shortly after his return, he accompanied Worthington Whittredge and John Frederick Kensett to the Rocky Mountains and continued on to Wyoming with Ferdinand V. Hayden's survey expedition. He travelled in the western USA, British Columbia and Alaska in 1874. He died six years later of pneumonia, after a trip with his wife to Lake Superior. In 1881 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York mounted a large memorial exhibition of Gifford's work, accompanied by a catalogue listing 739 of his paintings, which confirmed his position as a major member of the second generation of the Hudson River school. He has subsequently been seen as an important exponent of Luminism (i). (Grove Art Online Accessed 2006-07-26)

19th century

Hudson River school of landscape painting

Massachusetts (state)

Berkshire Hills (hills)

water

mountains

trees

landscapes (representations)

oil paintings

paintings (visual works)

paintings

oil on canvas

56 cm (H) x 91.8 cm (W)

M.H. De Young Memorial Museum

repository

78.74

accession

San Francisco, California

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