Biography from Spanierman Gallery:
| Sanford Gifford was one of the outstanding members of the 19th-century landscape movement in American art. Following on the heels of the early Hudson River artists, Thomas Doughty, Asher B. Durand, and Thomas Cole, a second-generation of artists including Gifford, John Kensett, and Martin Johnson Heade developed their styles into a landscape of mood and serenity, now known as luminism.
Gifford was born in Greenfield, Saratoga County, New York, the son of a wealthy industrialist. Gifford grew up in Hudson, New York, across the river from the Catskill home of his idol, Thomas Cole. The artist attended Brown University for two years but, soon after leaving the school, decided to devote his full attention to art.
In 1845, Gifford went to New York City to study with John Rubens Smith, an accomplished drawing master and author of "A Key to the Art of Drawing the Human Figure (183l)." Gifford studied drawing, perspective and anatomy with Smith, supplemented by drawing from casts and from life at the National Academy of Design. Up to this time, his training was in figural work but, after a sketching trip to the Catskills and the Berkshires in 1846, he gave up the figure completely for landscape. The direction he took was decidedly out of step with the predominant tradition. Unlike Cole, Gifford intended to paint landscapes without the aid of heroic or religious subjects or of transplanted European affectations.
Gifford worked in the New York area until 1855, when he left for Europe to travel and study for three years. In England, he was exposed to the work of J.M.W. Turner and the art criticism of John Ruskin; in Italy he traveled with the American painter Albert Bierstadt; in France he frequented the Louvre and saw the paintings of the French Barbizon School.
The artist returned to America in 1858, taking a studio in the Tenth Street Building where he associated with fellow-tenants Frederick E. Church, Worthington Whittredge, Albert Bierstadt, John Casilear, and others.
Gifford began to create works in his mature style, known today as Luminism. Working slowly and on a small scale, he balanced minute detail with a graceful sense of overall atmosphere. Brushwork is subdued; forms are clearly delineated; topography is sacrificed to the main focus -- the play of light. His statement that "landscape-painting is air-painting" shows his concentration on the subtleties of colored light."
Gifford continued to travel. In 1868 he went abroad again--this time traveling not only in Europe but in parts of the Middle East. The following year, he journeyed with the painters Worthington Whittredge and John Kensett to the Colorado Rockies, where he joined F. V. Hayden's surveying expedition to Wyoming.
Sanford Gifford died in New York City in 1880 at the age of fifty-seven. He was immediately honored by a memorial exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. |
Biography from The Columbus Museum-Georgia:
| Sanford Gifford’s ancestors included several generations that settled
in America as early as the seventeenth century. After the arrival
of children, the Gifford family planted their familial roots in the
city of Hudson, on the Hudson River, where the patriarch utilized
family resources to open a successful iron foundry. The location
of Hudson and its bustling industrial growth led to its importance in
New York, but the view of the Catskill Mountains created the scenery
that so many artists like Sanford Gifford sought to recreate and
interpret on canvas in the mid-nineteenth century.
Gifford attended Brown University for several semesters before
abandoning his academic studies for the life of an artist in New York
City, an action that received some resistance from his family.
Alternate reports on Gifford’s early studies in New York exist, but he
did attend classes at the National Academy of Design where he boldly
stated his intentions to become an artist.
Portraits consumed his early student years, but in the late 1840s, his
sketchbooks reflect initial explorations of the New England landscape
and its promise as a viable subject for his paintings. He
traversed the rivers, mountains and valleys around his home base of
Hudson and other locales in New York, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire.
In order to complete his visual arts education Gifford traveled to
Europe in the 1850s and explored the landscape of England, Scotland,
France, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy for two years. His
Grand Tour also involved museum visits and the acquaintances of
European and American artists such as Emmanuel Leutze, Albert
Bierstadt, Worthington Whittredge, and even the renowned British
theoretician John Ruskin.
Gifford’s career sustained involvement in the Civil War, and a slow
period before a second rejuvenating sojourn to Europe occurred in
1868-69. Throughout his life, Gifford remained involved in artist
organizations and continuously exhibited his work in America and
abroad. (1)
Gifford’s landscape paintings have played a critical role in the
development of an American art style created during the latter half of
the nineteenth century. By the time Gifford’s painting style
matured, Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School painters had already
initiated the moralizing American landscapes depicted on
canvas. Artists such as Gifford advanced these early
landscapes with an infusion of pure light and atmosphere to introduce a
style known as luminism to the American buying public. The
definition and parameters of this art movement are varied, but Barbara
Novak notes, “In a luminist landscape, nature is presented on a smooth,
mirror-like surface that shows barely a trace of the artistic
hand. In removing his presence from the painting, the artist acts
as a clarifying lens, allowing the spectator to confront the image more
directly and immediately. Perhaps because of the absence of
stroke, time stops, and the moment is locked in place—locked even more
by a strong horizontal organization, by an almost mathematical ordering
of planes in space parallel to the picture surface, and by deliberately
aligned vertical and occasional diagonal accents.” (2)
When isolating the statements of such a specific definition, each element applies perfectly to Gifford’s painting A Home in the Woods.
For this composition, Gifford places his view of mountain, lake and
shore within a horizontal format, which reinforces the placid
lake. The calm water reflects the towering mountain as well as
the shore and even a figure in a boat on the lake. Gifford
captures clearly a still moment in time, and emphasizes the effect with
delicately thin layers of paint to create the water, the mountain, and
the clear sky above. The thin glazing of paint in these areas
contrasts Gifford’s more obvious brushwork detailing the land and
foliage of the foreground, which slightly indicates the artist’s
presence without obscuring the viewer’s experience. Gifford
tempers the horizontal emphasis with an asymmetrical bottom third in
the composition, vertical trees, and diagonal accents of the lakeshore
and the path paralleling it. Gifford depicted the popular
picturesque composition—rough foreground foliage, middle ground with
reflective water and background of mountains.
Gifford was not alone in employing nature to provide religious or
mystical messages. Fellow landscape painters along with contemporary
American authors frequently discussed the transcendental qualities of
nature as well as nature’s representation of the sublime. In
order to promote the country’s seemingly good fortune and expansive
triumph with no obvious reference to economic plights or tensions from
the Civil War, Gifford painted the theme of an American wilderness with
an emphasis on the pioneer in several paintings.
Sources:
1. For detailed biographical information, see Ila Weiss, Poetic Landscape: The Art and Experience of Sanford R. Gifford (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987).
2. Barbara Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience
(New York: Harper & Row, 1979, second edition), 97-98. This
is Novak’s definition of luminism, a term that was first coined by John
I.H. Baur in 1954. Baur’s did not include the artist Sanford
Gifford in his discussion of luminism. However, Gifford’s
inclusion in this movement is solidified with Novak’s essays and
subsequent publications. For additional discussion see, Barbara
Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, revised edition) and John Wilmerding, American Light: The Luminist Movement, 1850-1875 (Washington: National Gallery of Art and Princeton University Press, 1989).
staff, Columbus Museum
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Biography from AskART:
| Known for realistic, refined depictions of 19th-century American
landscapes, Sanford Gifford used light as a technique to convey
emotions in a way that made him one of the country's leading
luminists. His mature style was a balancing of exacting detail of
forms with a sense of atmosphere that often sacrificed topographic
details. He finished his canvases by using multiple layers of
translucent varnish.
Early in his career, he was a portraitist,
but in the summer of 1846, a trip to the Berkshire Hills and Catskill
Mountains combined with his admiration for the painting of Hudson River
School painter Thomas Cole inspired him to return to the freedom of
landscape work. Gifford, like many of his peers, understood the
spiritual inspiration viewers found in the dramatic vistas of
landscape, but he was not as committed to these theories as many of
them. However, most of his paintings have luminous qualities with
brilliant light contrasted against strong shadows.
He was born
in Greenfield, New York and was raised in Hudson, New York, the son of
a wealthy industrialist. He attended Brown University for two
years but left to devote himself to a career in art and went to New
York City to study figure painting with watercolorist John Rubens
Smith. He stayed in New York until 1855.
During the
summers of 1846, he went on many walking tours through the Catskill and
Berkshire Mountains, and completed many paintings from his
sketches. These ventures combined with his great admiration for
Thomas Cole led him to devote himself to landscape painting, but he
avoided the prevalent heroic and religious subjects, imported from
Europe. From his sketching in New Hampshire and Maine, he
sometimes included Indians in canoes and teepees.
In 1855, he
traveled in Europe and was exposed to the French Barbizon painters and
was influenced in England by Joseph Turner's use of color, which
encouraged Gifford to experiment with a wide range of colors.
However, he regarded the Barbizon painters as sloppy and thought that
Turner overdid the effects of dissolving light. In Italy, he
traveled with American landscapist Albert Bierstadt.
In 1861, he
enlisted in the Seventh Regiment of the New York State National Guard
after the attack on South Carolina's Fort Sumter in April of that
year. During his service, he did many paintings expressing a
yearning for a quiet, peaceful place and then after the war, was a part
of the U.S. Geological Survey with Hayden to southern Wyoming. He
then returned to Europe until 1879. In 1880, the year of his
death, he went to the Colorado Rockies with Worthington Whittredge and
John Kensett.
Source:
Michael David Zellman, 300 Years of American Art
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Biography from AskART:
| Kevin
Avery of the Metropolitan Museum of Art along with Franklin Kelly of
the National Gallery have worked together to produce the definitive exhibition on this American artist.
Avery wrote: "While
Gifford was a great traveler, it was only in the last few years of his
life that he painted the shores of nearby Long Island. An earlier phase
of his career had been devoted to the New Jersey shoreline, where he
enjoyed the "bare, solitary, vast elemental nature" of the shoreline.
Evidently he found something similar on Long Island, as he sought out
only the most secluded of spots, places at dawn or dusk when only a few
fishermen might have been around."
A critic of his day, Henry
Tuckerman once wrote about Gifford's work saying, "they appeal to our
calm and thoughtful appreciation; they minister to our gentle and
gracious sympathies." While others who wrote about Long Island
preferred go on and on about the endless procession of inbound waves,
Gifford opted for a different mode, instead he shows the subdued side
of nature in which the viewer can take serene pleasure in a quiet
moment all the while conveying the vastness around us.
Source:
Alexander
Boyle, who was featured on the television show "America's First River,
Bill Moyers on the Hudson. Boyle worked with the Metropolitan Museum of
Art as the Assistant Director of a film, "American Paradise, the World
of the Hudson River School" and from 1988 to 2001 was Vice-President of
Godel & Co. Fine Art in New York where he bought, sold and wrote
about the artists of the Hudson River School, American marine painting,
and American Impressionism.
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