Artist

Sanford Robinson Gifford

born Greenfield, NY 1823-died New York City 1880
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Also known as
  • Sanford R. Gifford
  • S. R. Gifford
  • Sanford Gifford
Born
Greenfield, New York, United States
Died
New York, New York, United States
Biography

A major Hudson River school painter with extensive European experience, Gifford traveled west several times. In 1870 he joined F. V. Hayden's geological survey to Wyoming, leaving his two artist-companions, John F. Kensett and Worthington Whittredge, behind in Denver. Gifford produced only a few western landscape subjects (see his Valley of the Chugwater, which may be compared with a photograph by William H. Jackson of Gifford painting the scene. Gifford journeyed to the Northwest Coast in 1874, visiting Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska. Again he seems to have been more interested in the experience rather than in painting; only a few works have survived from this trip.

References

Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823-1880) (Austin: University of Texas Art Museum, 1970); Metropolitan Museum of Art, Memorial Catalogue of the Paintings of Sanford Robinson Gifford, NA, with a Biography and Critical Essay by Prof. John F. Weir of the Yale School of Fine Arts (1881; New York: Olana Gallery, 1974); Weiss, Poetic Landscapes.

William Truettner, ed The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920 (Washington, D.C. and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991)

Works by this artist (1 item)

Nancy Wolf, Expulsion, 1980, pencil on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift from the collection of Eric Green and Jock Truman, 1996.20
Expulsion
Date1980
pencil on paper
Not on view

Exhibitions

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The Civil War and American Art
November 16, 2012April 28, 2013
The Civil War and American Art examines how America’s artists represented the impact of the Civil War and its aftermath.

Related Books

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The Civil War and American Art
The Civil War and American Art looks at the range of artwork created in the years between 1852 and 1877. Author Eleanor Jones Harvey surveys paintings made by some of America’s finest artists, including Frederic Edwin Church, Sanford Gifford, Winslow Homer, and Eastman Johnson, and photographs taken by George Barnard, Alexander Gardner, and Timothy O’Sullivan.
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Variations on America: Masterworks from American Art Forum Collections
The American Art Forum, a small group of collectors from across the United States, was begun twenty years ago by Charles C. Eldredge while he was director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Now, as part of the Forum’s twentieth anniversary celebrations, the Smithsonian American Art Museum is proud to offer Variations on America, a volume of seventy-two treasured artworks collected by members of the Forum. Chief curator Eleanor Jones Harvey, deputy chief curator George Gurney, senior curators Virginia M. Mecklenburg and Joann Moser, former Luce Foundation Center curator George Speer, and curatorial assistant Elaine Yau present significant and lively contributions about these works.