Editor's note: The Metropolitan Museum of Art provided
source material to Resource Library for the following article or
essay. If you have questions or comments regarding the source material,
please contact The Metropolitan Museum of Art directly through either this
phone number or web address:
Hudson River School Visions:
The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford
October 8, 2003 - February 8, 2004
The noted American
painter Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823-1880) - a master of the 
atmospheric landscape, who was the subject of the very
first monographic exhibition in the Metropolitan's history 123 years ago
- will be the subject of a major new retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum
of Art this fall. This showing of Gifford's work will be the first in more
than 30 years and only the second since his Memorial Exhibition at the Museum
in 1880. Opening on October 7, Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes
of Sanford R. Gifford will feature some 70 paintings reflecting the
artist's travels in America, Europe, and the Middle East. (right:
The Ruins of the Parthenon, 1880, oil on canvas, 27-5/8 x 53-3/8
inches (70.2 x 135.6 cm), In the Collection of The Corcoran Gallery of Art,
Museum Purchase)
Brought together from museums and private collections in
America and abroad, the works in the exhibition will include several that
have never before been shown. A highlight will be Gifford's last major painting,
the ethereal masterpiece of sunlight and shadow from 1880 The Ruins of
the Parthenon, Looking South-west from the Acropolis over the Head of the
Saronic Gulf (Corcoran Gallery of Art).
Sanford Gifford began training in New York City to be a
portrait painter, but - inspired by the work of the American landscapist
Thomas Cole - turned to landscape painting. Gifford spent the summer of
1846 touring and sketching in the Catskill and Berkshire mountains, and
by 1847, had begun to show his work at the American Art-Union and the National
Academy of Design, where he was elected an associate in 1851 and an academician
in 1854. 
In 1855, Gifford traveled to Europe, where he spent two-and-a-half
years visiting the great repositories of art and sketching scenery in England,
Scotland, France, the Low Countries, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. In
England, he admired the color and light in the paintings of J. M. W. Turner,
and discussed his work with the critic John Ruskin. Gifford was also impressed
by the work of the French landscape painters of the Barbizon school, but
wrote in his journal of the dangers of surrendering to a particular method
or school of painting, lest they "usurp the place of Nature."
(right: Hunter Mountain, Twilight, 1866, oil on canvas, 30-5/8
x 54-1/8 inches (77.8 x 137.5 cm), Terra Foundation for the Arts, Daniel
J. Terra Collection)
When Gifford returned to the United States in 1857, he
took up quarters in the new Tenth Street Studio Building in New York City
but left it nearly every summer to sketch in the countryside. Favorite settings
in this period were the Catskills, the Adirondacks, the Green Mountains
in Vermont, the White Mountains in New Hampshire, and various locales in
Maine and Nova Scotia. The artist's fascination with the transfiguring effects
of light on the native scenery is apparent in works such as the 1862 painting
Gorge in the Mountains (formerly Kauterskill Clove), in which
the blazing noon sun hovers over an idyllic mountain gorge (The Metropolitan
Museum of Art).
During the early years of the Civil War, Gifford served
in New York's renowned Seventh Regiment. His experiences during the war
inspired a number of paintings of campsites in Virginia and Maryland,
and informed several works, such as Hunter Mountain, Twilight (Terra
Museum of American Art), a melancholy landscape of 1866.
In 1868, Gifford went abroad for a second and last time,
spending more than a year traveling in Europe and the Near East. The mirrorlike
waters and luminous aerial effects that typify Leander's Tower on the
Bosphorus (1870) and Isola Bella in Lago Maggiore (1871) are
based on studies from this time (Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art
Museums and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, respectively). 
Gifford, along with notable artists and civic leaders of
the day, was a founder of New York City's Metropolitan Museum in 1870. After
he died in 1880, he was honored with the Metropolitan's first monographic
retrospective and a memorial catalogue of his known pictures. (right:
A Gorge in the Mountains, 1862, oil on canvas, 48 x 39-7/8 inches
(121.9 x 101.3 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Maria DeWitt
Jesup, from the collection of her husband, Morris K. Jesup, 1914 [15.30.62])
The Hudson River School, first identified at the end of
its heyday, was a fraternity of artists who worked principally in New York
City from about 1840 to 1875. Together, they raised landscape painting to
preeminent status in America in the mid-19th century. Originally attracted
by the grandeur of natural scenery along the Hudson River and in New England,
the painters interpreted both the wilderness and the pastoral face of a
growing and changing nation.
Thomas Cole (1801-1848) was the founding figure of the
school. He drew the engraver Asher B. Durand (1796-1886) to landscape painting,
and together they constituted the first generation of the group. Cole and
Durand influenced a second generation of younger painters, including Gifford
and his colleagues Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900), John Kensett (1816-1872),
Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), and Worthington Whittredge (1820-1910).
The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated
catalogue. The book will feature essays by the exhibition's co-curators
Kevin Avery and Franklin Kelly, and by Eleanor Jones Harvey, Luce Center
Curator, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Heidi Applegate, doctoral
candidate, Columbia University. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of
Art and distributed by Yale University Press, the catalogue will be available
in the Museum's Book Shops. The exhibition catalogue is made possible in
part by the William Cullen Bryant Fellows of the Metropolitan Museum.
In conjunction with the exhibition, a variety of educational
programs will be scheduled. These will include two slide-illustrated lectures
on Saturday, December 13, by Mr. Avery and Mr. Kelly, followed by the screening
of a documentary film on the paintings of the Hudson River School, from
2:00 to 5:00 p.m. in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium. These programs
are free with Museum admission.
After its showing at the Metropolitan Museum, the exhibition
will be on view at the Amon Carter Museum (Fort Worth, Texas) from March
6 through May 16, 2004, and the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.)
from June 27 through September 26, 2004.
The exhibition is organized by The Metropolitan Museum
of Art, New York, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington. The exhibition
is organized by Franklin Kelly, Senior Curator of British and American Painting,
The National Gallery of Art, and Kevin J. Avery, Associate Curator, Department
of American Paintings and Sculpture, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, with
the assistance of Claire A. Conway, Research Assistant, Department of American
Paintings and Sculpture.
The Museum's website http://www.metmuseum.org/
will include a special feature about the exhibition.
Metropolitan Museum of Art's MetPublications,
an online resource that offers in-depth access to the Museum's print and
online publications, covering art, art history, archaeology, conservation,
and collecting.includes the following title available for.pdf download:
Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford;
Avery, Kevin J., and Franklin Kelly, with Claire A. Conway, and essays by
Heidi Applegate and Eleanor James Harvey (2003)
Read more articles and essays concerning this institutional
source by visiting the sub-index page for the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in Resource Library.
Links to sources of information outside of our web site
are provided only as referrals for your further consideration. Please use
due diligence in judging the quality of information contained in these and
all other web sites. Information from linked sources may be inaccurate or
out of date. TFAO neither recommends or endorses these referenced organizations.
Although TFAO includes links to other web sites, it takes no responsibility
for the content or information contained on those other sites, nor exerts
any editorial or other control over them. For more information on evaluating
web pages see TFAO's General Resources section
in Online Resources for Collectors and Students of Art History.
Search for more
articles and essays on American art in Resource Library. See America's Distinguished Artists for biographical information on historic artists.
This page was originally published in 2003 in Resource
Library Magazine. Please see Resource Library's Overview section for
more information.
Copyright 2003-2013 Traditional
Fine Arts Organization, Inc., an Arizona nonprofit
corporation. All rights reserved.