Sanford Robinson Gifford (July 10, 1823 – August 29, 1880) was an American landscape painter and a leading member of the second generation of Hudson River School artists. A highly-regarded practitioner of Luminism, his work was noted for its emphasis on light and soft atmospheric effects.
Childhood and early career
He was born in Greenfield, New York, the fourth of the eleven children of Quaker ironmaker Elihu Gifford and Eliza Robinson Starbuck. He spent his childhood in Hudson, New York, and entered Brown University in 1842. He left college after his sophomore year, and moved to New York City in 1845 to study art. He studied drawing, perspective and anatomy under the British watercolorist and drawing-master, John Rubens Smith, and took drawing classes at the National Academy of Design. He also studied the human figure in anatomy classes at the Crosby Street Medical College.
Although trained as a portrait painter, the first work Gifford exhibited at the National Academy was a landscape, in 1847. Thereafter, Gifford devoted himself primarily to landscape painting, becoming one of the finest artists of the Hudson River School. He was elected an Associate of the National Academy in 1851, and an Academician in 1854.
Gifford's travels
Like most Hudson River School artists, Gifford traveled extensively to find scenic landscapes to sketch and paint. In addition to exploring New England, upstate New York and New Jersey, Gifford made extensive trips abroad. He first traveled to Europe from 1855 to 1857, to study European art and sketch subjects for future paintings. During this trip Gifford also met and traveled extensively with Albert Bierstadt and Worthington Whittredge.
In 1858, he traveled to Mount Mansfield, Vermont's tallest mountain, with his friend and fellow painter Jerome Thompson. Sketches made during their visit were published in the magazine Home Journal. Gifford painted some 20 paintings from the Vermont sketches. Of these, Mount Mansfield (1858) was his primary work, exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1859. Thompson also exhibited a painting of Mount Mansfield in same exhibition, Belated Party on Mansfield Mountain. Thompson's work is now owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (See "2008 NAD controversy," below.)
Gifford served as a corporal in the 7th Regiment of the New York Militia during the Civil War, guarding Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, 1861-1863. A few of his canvases belonging to New York City's Seventh Regiment and the Union League Club of New York are testament to this troubled time.
During the summer of 1867, Gifford spent most of his time painting on the New Jersey coast, specifically at Sandy Hook and Long Branch, according to an auction Web site. The Mouth of the Shrewsbury River, one noted canvas from the period, is a dramatic scene depicting a series of telegraph poles extending into an atmospheric distance underneath ominous storm clouds.
Another journey, this time with Jervis McEntee and his wife, took him across Europe in 1868. Leaving the McEntees behind, Gifford traveled to the Middle East, including Egypt in 1869. Then in the summer of 1870 Gifford ventured to the Rocky Mountains in the western United States, this time with Worthington Whittredge and John Frederick Kensett. At least part of the 1870 travels were as part of a Hayden Expedition, led by Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden.