This is a biography of American landscape painter Sanford Robinson Gifford, a leading member of the Hudson River School. It discusses he extensive travels in search of scenic landscapes.
Sanford Gifford (American, 1823-1880), a leading Hudson River School landscape painter and a founder of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, was so esteemed by the New York art world that, at his untimely death, the Museum mounted a show of his work-the first monographic exhibition accorded any artist-and published a Memorial Catalogue that, for nearly a century, remained the principal source on his oeuvre. Gifford's art, which was inspired by the work of Thomas Cole, the founder of the Hudson River School, and by that of British artist J.M.W. Turner, and enriched by his travels in Europe (from 1855 to 1857, and from 1868 to 1869), came to be called "air painting," for he made the ambient light of each scene-color saturated and atmospherically potent-the key to its expression. His approach to painting and his unique style gave rise to a highly distinctive body of work with enchanting and mesmerizing effect. This publication examines seventy paintings by the artist and includes comparative illustrations of related works by Gifford, his Hudson River School mentors and colleagues, and those painters, in addition to Cole and Turner, who exerted influence on his art, including Frederic Edwin Church and John F. Kensett. The essays discuss Gifford's place in the Hudson River School, his numerous Catskill Mountain subjects, his experiences and perceptions as a traveler both at home and abroad, and the variety of his patrons. -- Metropolitan Museum of Art website.
Collects the best artwork created before, during and following the Civil War, in the years between 1859 and 1876, along with extensive quotations from men and women alive during the war years and text by literary figures, including Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. 15,000 first printing.
AskART.com presents a biographical sketch of American artist and painter Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823-1880). Additional information for Gifford includes a bibliography of publications about the artist, museum holdings, current exhibits, images of the artist's work, etc. The artist's paintings include some that are representative of the Hudson River school of landscape painting. Auction records, including highest prices, are available only to AskART members.
The Hudson River began to figure prominently in the artistic consciousness of the nineteenth century when painter Thomas Cole journeyed up its waters in the summer of 1825. The canvases inspired by that trip made his reputation. He settled at Catskill on the Hudson and became the model for other American landscape painters, thus launching the Hudson River School and its romantic, idealized vision of the American landscape. The river elicited some of these painters' greatest works, and became an iconic emblem for artists and their public alike. In this volume, lavishly illustrated with more than seventy-five color plates, Driscoll surveys the ideas, events, and figures of the Hudson River School movement and explores the diversity of nineteenth-century Romantic American landscape painting. Highlighted in these pages are works by sixty artists, including such well-known figures as Thomas Cole, John F. Kensett, Sanford Gifford, Frederic Church, William Trost Richards, and Worthington Whittredge. The work of many lesser-known artists is also brought to light, including that of women such as Eliza Greatorex, Mrs. A.T. Oakes, and Laura Woodward; forgotten masters John H. Carmiencke and Regis Gignoux; and the most illustrious African-American artist associated with the school, Robert Duncanson.