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Sanford Robinson Gifford Biography
American painter
born 1823 - died 1880
Sanford Robinson Gifford was one of the outstanding
members of the 19th-century landscape
movement in American art. Following on the
heels of the early Hudson River artists,
Thomas Doughty, Asher B. Durand, and Thomas
Cole, a second-generation of artists
including Gifford, John Kensett, and Martin
Johnson Heade developed their styles into a
landscape of mood and serenity, now known as
luminism. |
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Gifford worked in the New York area until
1855, when he left for Europe to travel and
study for three years. In England, Sanford Robinson Gifford painter was
exposed to the painting of J.M.W. Turner and the
art criticism of John Ruskin; in Italy
he traveled with the American painter Albert
Bierstadt; in France he frequented the
Louvre and saw the Sanford Robinson Gifford paintings of the French Barbizon
School.
Sanford Robinson Gifford began to create paintings in his mature
style, known today as Luminism. Working
slowly and on a small scale, Sanford Robinson Gifford artist balanced
minute detail with a graceful sense of
overall atmosphere. Brushwork is subdued;
forms are clearly delineated; topography is
sacrificed to the main focus -- the play of
light. His statement that
"landscape painting is air-painting" shows
his concentration on the subtleties of
colored light."
Portraits consumed his early student years,
but in the late 1840s, his sketchbooks
reflect initial explorations of the New
England landscape and its promise as a
viable subject for Sanford Robinson Gifford paintings. He traversed the rivers, mountains and valleys
around his home base of Hudson and other
locales in New York, Pennsylvania and New
Hampshire.
Sanford Robinson Gifford landscape paintings have played a
critical role in the development of an
American art style created during the latter
half of the nineteenth century. By the time
Sanford Robinson Gifford painting style matured, Thomas Cole and the Hudson
River School artists had already initiated the moralizing American landscapes
depicted on canvas. In removing his presence from the Sanford Robinson Gifford
painting, the artist acts as a clarifying lens, allowing the spectator to
confront the image more directly and immediately.
When isolating the statements of such a
specific definition, each element applies
perfectly to Sanford Robinson Gifford painting A Home in the Woods. For this
composition, Sanford Robinson Gifford painter places his view of mountain, lake and
shore within a horizontal format, which reinforces the placid lake.
In order to promote the
country’s seemingly good fortune and
expansive triumph with no obvious reference
to economic plights or tensions from the
Civil War, Sanford Robinson Gifford painted the theme of an
American wilderness with an emphasis on the
pioneer in several Sanford Robinson Gifford paintings. |
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