(Sanford Robinson Gifford
BORN: July 10, 1823 in Greenfie...)
Sanford Robinson Gifford
BORN: July 10, 1823 in Greenfield, New York.
DIED: August 29, 1880 in New York City, New York.
MOVEMENT: Hudson River School.
INTERESTING FACTS:
Gifford attended Brown University before he studied under John R. Smith, a British watercolorist.
He became an associate member at the National Academy in 1851 and an academician in 1854.
Gifford traveled to Europe with Albert Bierstadt and Worthington Whittredge.
He also traveled to the Rocky Mountains with Whittredge and John Frederick Kensett. Gifford was part of the Hayden Expedition in surveying the Rocky Mountains.
NOTABLE WORKS:
Lake Nemi, Ruins of the Parthenon, Kaaterskill Falls.
GIFFORD Art Book contains 80 reproductions of Luminist landscapes with title and date.
Gifford Sanford Robinson was a landscape-painter. He was an academician of the National Academy of Design.
Background
Sanford Robinson Gifford was born on July 10, 1823, at Greenfield, Saratoga County, New York. He was the son of Elihu Gifford and Eliza Robinson Starbuck Gifford.
His father was the owner of extensive iron-works at Hudson, New York, to which place the family moved in 1824 when the boy was about a year old.
Education
At Catskill, just across the Hudson River, Thomas Cole and Frederick E. Church were working at the time of Gifford’s boyhood, and it was but natural that he should be interested in them; indeed his artistic aspirations were first aroused by contemplation of the works of Cole.
He entered Brown University in 1842, but remained there only two years, for he then definitely determined to devote himself to landscape-painting. With this purpose in view he proceeded to New York and enrolled himself as a pupil of John Rubens Smith, a water-colorist and son of John Raphael Smith, the well- known English engraver.
The instruction received from Smith was the only technical training he ever had, though he was always a student, with a mind open to the teachings of nature and the masters of art.
He set out upon the first of several foreign tours in 1855, when he visited the art museums of the chief European capitals, but found nothing in the art schools that made him wish for their training.
Career
How rapidly Gifford's talent developed is shown by his election as an associate of the National Academy of Design in 1851 and his election as an academician in 1854.
He spent the summer sketching in England, Scotland, and Wales, and after a run on the Continent passed the winter in Paris. During the following summer, 1856, he made a long pedestrian tour through Belgium and Holland, went up the Rhine to Switzerland, and thence over the Alps into Italy.
Worthington Whittredge, who met him in the course of this trip, and went up the Rhine with him, recounts his direct and original comments on the scenery.
Gifford spent the winter of 1856-57, in Rome, where he lived in modest style in a street leading from the Pincian Hill and commanding a view of the city and the dome of St. Peter’s.
In the spring and summer of 1857, he made a sketching trip through the Abruzzi and in the neighborhood of Naples and later went to Austria.
He returned to New York in September 1857 and took a studio in the old Tenth-Street building, which he retained to the end of his life. He made a second journey to Europe with Jervis McEntee in 1859.
At the outbreak of the Civil War, Gifford joined the 7th New York Regiment and served in the ranks through the campaigns of 1861 and 1863-64. A few pictures from his hand record his impressions of military life, but this field was not of a nature to accord with his artistic ideals.
Again in 1868, he went to Europe and spent two years, painting in Italy, Sicily, Greece, Syria, Egypt, and Turkey.
In 1870, Gifford started on a painting trip to the Rocky-Mountain region with his friends Whittredge and Kensett, but an unexpected opportunity to join Col. Hayden’s exploring party in a horseback expedition through the Indian country of Colorado and Wyoming led him to desert his artist companions.
In 1880, his health became impaired, and on the advice of his physician, he went with his wife to the Lake-Superior region to recuperate. The hoped-for improvement was not realized.
His condition became worse. He returned to New York in a very feeble state, and at the end of a few weeks, he died of pneumonia, in the fifty-eighth year of his age.
Gifford’s work was mainly differentiated from that of his contemporaries by its emotional content, its glowing color, and romantic cast. He was more intent upon the phenomena of air and light than the other men of the Hudson River school; his perception of values was more subtle.
His landscapes are sunny, cheerful, and sweet; his palette, though of no great depth, agreeable. The subjective nature of his art sets it apart from realism and gives it a personal note. It is the self-expression of a sensitive poetic artist.
Quotations:
“I have lived a frugal life in order to provide for independent old age and to be able to help a friend. ”
Membership
Gifford was an associate of the National Academy of Design.
Personality
Gifford had a liberal share of the typical artist’s independence and curiosity, and his interest in new places and people was inexhaustible. His wide experience as a traveler had taught him the advantage of roving with a minimum of impedimenta.
Though he was well-to-do, he shunned luxury or display and lived in an almost ascetic manner.
The testimony of all who were close to him is emphatic as to the simplicity, unselfishness, and nobility of his character.
Interests
Gifford's chief recreation was fishing. He sought many remote waters for this sport - those of the Catskills, the Berkshire Hills, the wildernesses of Maine and Canada, the Middle West, and the Adirondacks; he even went to Alaska.
Connections
Sanford Robinson Gifford married Mary Cecelia Canfield in 1877.