Sanford Robinson Gifford Paintings

Sanford Robinson Gifford Biography

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.

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.