: Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823-1880), a masterful Nineteenth
Century landscape painter and member of the Hudson River School
of painting, is the subject of this splendid, overdue
retrospective. Gifford is not as well known as many of his Hudson
River contemporaries, due in part to the smaller size of his
luminous pictures and the fact that he died at the height of his
powers at age 57.
In fact, as this exhibition documents, Gifford was an innovative,
original landscapist, whose use of color and atmosphere set him
apart from his colleagues. Utilizing fluid brushstrokes and a
disciplined palette of pale blues, greens, roses and yellows, he
captured the effects of light on a variety of settings. As
critic-historian Henry T. Tuckerman observed in 1866 of Gifford's
works, "they do not dazzle, they win; they appeal to our calm and
thoughtful appreciation; they minister to our most gentle and
gracious sympathies, to our most tranquil and congenial
observation."
Often paying homage to the sanctity of the American wilderness,
Gifford painted not only the natural world, but also how a viewer
perceives it through layers of atmosphere and light. As his
friend and fellow artist John F. Weir put it, in Gifford's art "a
veil is made between the canvas and the spectator's eye - a veil
that corresponds to the natural veil of the atmosphere...the
object itself is of secondary importance."
In these contexts, Gifford made special contributions to American
art of his century and deserves the recognition this
retrospective is bound to engender.
