Gifford Sanford Robinson oil painting workshop supplies

Sanford Robinson Gifford
American painter
born 1823 - died 1880

Student of: John Rubens Smith (1775-1849).
Friend of: Thomas Worthington Whittredge (1820-1910).
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, Sanford Robinson Gifford gave up the figure completely for landscape. The direction Sanford Robinson Gifford 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 Sanford Robinson Gifford left for Europe to travel and study for three years. In England, Sanford Robinson Gifford was exposed to the work of J.M.W. Turner and the art criticism of John Ruskin; in Italy Sanford Robinson Gifford traveled with the American painter Albert Bierstadt; in France Sanford Robinson Gifford frequented the Louvre and saw the paintings of the French Barbizon School. - Gifford Sanford Robinson oil painting workshop supplies - Gifford Sanford Robinson oil painting workshops supply oil painting American, oil painting workshop supplies Gifford Sanford Robinson Bio, Gifford oil painting supply.

The artist returned to America in 1858, taking a studio in the Tenth Street Building where Sanford Robinson Gifford 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, Sanford Robinson Gifford 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 Sanford Robinson Gifford went abroad again--this time traveling not only in Europe but in parts of the Middle East. The following year, Sanford Robinson Gifford journeyed with the painters Worthington Whittredge and John Kensett to the Colorado Rockies, where Sanford Robinson Gifford joined F. V. Hayden's surveying expedition to Wyoming.

Sanford Gifford died in New York City in 1880 at the age of fifty-seven. Sanford Robinson Gifford was immediately honored by a memorial exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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 Sanford Robinson oil painting workshop supplies - Gifford Sanford Robinson oil painting workshops supply oil painting American, oil painting workshop supplies Gifford Sanford Robinson Bio, Gifford oil painting supply.

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 Sanford Robinson Gifford did attend classes at the National Academy of Design where Sanford Robinson Gifford 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. Sanford Robinson Gifford 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 Sanford Robinson oil painting workshop supplies - Gifford Sanford Robinson oil painting workshops supply oil painting American, oil painting workshop supplies Gifford Sanford Robinson Bio, Gifford oil painting supply.

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

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. Sanford Robinson Gifford finished his canvases by using multiple layers of translucent varnish.

Early in his career, Sanford Robinson Gifford 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 Sanford Robinson Gifford 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. Sanford Robinson Gifford 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. Sanford Robinson Gifford stayed in New York until 1855. - Gifford Sanford Robinson oil painting workshop supplies - Gifford Sanford Robinson oil painting workshops supply oil painting American, oil painting workshop supplies Gifford Sanford Robinson Bio, Gifford oil painting supply.

During the summers of 1846, Sanford Robinson Gifford 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 Sanford Robinson Gifford avoided the prevalent heroic and religious subjects, imported from Europe. From his sketching in New Hampshire and Maine, Sanford Robinson Gifford sometimes included Indians in canoes and teepees.

In 1855, Sanford Robinson Gifford 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, Sanford Robinson Gifford regarded the Barbizon painters as sloppy and thought that Turner overdid the effects of dissolving light. In Italy, Sanford Robinson Gifford traveled with American landscapist Albert Bierstadt.

In 1861, Sanford Robinson Gifford 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, Sanford Robinson Gifford 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. Sanford Robinson Gifford then returned to Europe until 1879. In 1880, the year of his death, Sanford Robinson Gifford went to the Colorado Rockies with Worthington Whittredge and John Kensett.

Source:
Michael David Zellman, 300 Years of American Art


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 Sanford Robinson Gifford painted the shores of nearby Long Island. An earlier phase of his career had been devoted to the New Jersey shoreline, where Sanford Robinson Gifford enjoyed the "bare, solitary, vast elemental nature" of the shoreline. Evidently Sanford Robinson Gifford found something similar on Long Island, as Sanford Robinson Gifford sought out only the most secluded of spots, places at dawn or dusk when only a few fishermen might have been around." - Gifford Sanford Robinson oil painting workshop supplies - Gifford Sanford Robinson oil painting workshops supply oil painting American, oil painting workshop supplies Gifford Sanford Robinson Bio, Gifford oil painting supply.

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 Sanford Robinson Gifford 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 Sanford Robinson Gifford bought, sold and wrote about the artists of the Hudson River School, American marine painting, and American Impressionism.

[1] Benson cited in Avery, Kevin J. and Franklin Kelly. Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003) 4.
[2] Cikovsky, Jr., Nicolai, Sanford Robinson Gifford (Austin: University of Texas Art Museum, 1970) 9.
[3] Weiss, Ila, The Art and Experience of Sanford R. Gifford (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987) 115.
[4] Benson cited in Avery, Kevin J. and Franklin Kelly, 4.
[5] Cikovsky, 16.
[6] Cikovsky, 12.
[7] Cikovsky, 12.


Sanford Robinson Gifford papers, 1840s - 1970s

aca. 200 items (on 9 microfilm reels)
Reel(s): D10 (fr. 1202-1226), D21, D33 (fr. 1-138), (D254 (fr. 1-148), 672 (fr. 1-87), 688 (fr. 1-630), and 4
Letters, printed material, sketchbooks, art works, photographs, diaries, and biographical material.

REEL D10: Letters from Gifford to his sister, Molly, written from Europe, 1856-1857, describing his travels; 2 letters written from Egypt, 1869, describing Cairo and his cruise down the Nile, and to O.B. Frothingham, 1874, discussing his ancestory, education, art training, extensive travels in Europe, including touring Italy with Albert Bierstadt, the American west with Worthington Whittredge, Egypt, and his service during the Civil War and the paintings it inspired.
REEL D21: Typescripts of 64 letters, 1855-1869, from England, France, Germany, and Italy written by Gifford to his family including notes on other Americans in Europe and on attitudes towards the European scene.an scene. - Gifford Sanford Robinson oil painting workshop supplies - Gifford Sanford Robinson oil painting workshops supply oil painting American, oil painting workshop supplies Gifford Sanford Robinson Bio, Gifford oil painting supply.
REEL D33 (portions refilmed on reel 2813): Clippings and exhibition catalogs, ca. 1866-1884, among them the Gifford memorial meeting and exhibition by the Century Association, 1880, with a 14 p. eulogy by Worthington Whittredge, and 2 catalogs (Pts. 1 and 2) from Thomas E. Kirby & Co., auctioneers, for a sale held at Chickering Hall, Apr. 11-12, 1881, of the Sanford R. Gifford Collection, Thomas Kirby, auctioneer.
REEL D254: Five sketchbooks, August, 1847 through September, 1879.
REEL 672: A portfolio of 38 drawings, some by Gifford, and 13 engravings by several artists; photographs of Gifford during the Civil War and of Indians.
REEL 688: 16 sketchbooks, 1845-1874; a photograph of Gifford and of a self-portrait; passports and certificates; a European travel diary, 1888, of Mary Louise Willard, who married Gifford's nephew, Harold; and a letter, 1966, from Dr. Sanford Gifford describing the correspondence of his great-grandfather, Charles Gifford, brother of Sanford.

The titles of oil painting old master Sanford Robinson Gifford