Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, April 6, 2026 : Sanford Robinson Gifford, an American painter (#2493)

Monday, April 6, 2026

Artist of the Day, April 6, 2026 : Sanford Robinson Gifford, an American painter (#2493)

The second-generation Hudson River School painter Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823 – 1880) built a reputation as a master of light and atmosphere. Born in Greenfield, Saratoga County, New York, as an infant he moved with his family to Hudson, New York, where his father operated and financed iron foundries and a bank. On his eldest brother Charles’s example, he became enamored of art at an early age and may have received some early instruction from Henry Ary, a landscape and portrait painter who had moved to Hudson from Catskill, where he had been a neighbor of Thomas Cole, the progenitor of the American landscape school.

Gifford attended Brown University for two years, but did not graduate, telling his parents that he wished to be an artist. Soon after college, he went to New York City to study with the well-known art pedagogue (and fine watercolorist), the English emigré John Rubens Smith. Under Smith, and perhaps at his parents’ insistence, Gifford trained to become a portrait and figure painter, but longed to follow in Cole’s footsteps and to join what was already a small society of young artists inspired by Cole and Asher B. Durand, the president of the National Academy of Design, to pursue landscape painting. By 1847, Gifford had exhibited his first painting at the Academy, submitting almost annually thereafter. In 1850, he was elected an associate of the Academy and, in 1854, a full Academician.

Though Gifford’s signature style was emerging in the early 1850s, his artistic maturity did not come until well into his first trip to Europe, in 1855–57. An admirer of Turner since his boyhood perusals of his brother’s prints after the artist, Gifford studied and copied the master’s work in London’s National Gallery and even visited Turner’s champion, the critic John Ruskin, to discuss his work. Gifford moved on to visit France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany. At Düsseldorf, he paused for a time with the community of American artists studying at the academy in that city; then, in the company of several of them, he traveled down the Rhine into Switzerland and Italy, settling in Rome in the spring of 1856.

The artist’s reputation mounted rapidly through the Civil War years, earned with masterworks such as the Metropolitan’s Gorge in the Mountains, in which the circular diffusion of sunlight seems to shape the terrain of the Catskill vale made famous in the fiction of Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper and in the early paintings of Cole. Such works were executed amidst the artist’s own service in the war, as a national guardsman stationed in defense of Washington, D.C. and Baltimore in the summers of 1861–63.

In 1868–69, Gifford made his second and last Old World visit, this time adding an excursion down the Nile in Egypt and stops in Turkey and Greece to his return visits to Italy and other European nations. He lingered some six weeks in Venice, finding himself this time utterly seduced by the so-called Queen of the Adriatic. With its growing reputation as a tourist mecca, Venice became a frequent subject in the years thereafter, as did Italian subjects in general, such as the Metropolitan’s Tivoli and Isola Bella in Lago Maggiore.

The last decade of Gifford’s career was unexceptional for him just after his return to the United States, but events of his final years may have stimulated fresh inspiration. In the mid-1870s, the artist lent his voice to those conservative academicians opposing the younger, emerging talents in Continental-trained figural art who lobbied intensely for more and better representation at the academy exhibitions.

A founder of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1870, in 1881 Gifford was accorded the institution’s first monographic retrospective, in its new building in Central Park. The Museum in the same year also published the Memorial Catalogue of the Paintings of Sanford Robinson Gifford, N.A., compiled by his friend McEntee and the Museum’s Waldo Pratt, listing 735 works. Those form the majority, if scarcely all, of the output of this productive and first-rank Hudson River School painter.

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