Sanford Robinson Gifford 1823 - 1880

W.P. Avery
Alice Frazer, Lowell, Massachusetts
Sold: Christie's New York, June 3, 1982, lot 49, illustrated (as In the Wilderness)
Alexander Gallery, New York (acquired at the above sale)
Donna Pearson Neuhoff, Dallas, Texas 
Taggart, Jorgensen & Putnam, Washington, D.C. 
Acquired by the present owner from the above, 1987

(possibly) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gifford Memorial Catalogue, New York, 1881, no. 436
Ila Weiss, Poetic Landscape: The Art and Experience of Sanford R. Gifford, Newark, Delaware, 1987, p. 222

This work is in very good condition. The canvas is unlined. Under UV: there are scattered pindots of inpainting in the sky, primarily in the upper left. There are two other dots of inpainting in the lower center and upper right.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Of all the Hudson River School artists, Sanford Robinson Gifford was one of the few actually native to the Hudson River Valley, having been born in Greenfield, New York. Gifford attended Brown University for two years before deciding to become an artist. He studied in New York with drawing master John Rubens Smith, and attended drawing classes at the National Academy of Design, where he worked from plaster casts.

 

Gifford’s sophisticated views of the nineteenth-century American landscape are exceptionally eloquent visions of nature, fundamentally rooted in and inspired by his direct observations. Painted in 1861, the present work portrays Mount Chocorua, New Hampshire as seen from Chocorua Lake. In a letter of October 2016, Ila Weiss writes;

“The painting in question is a superb and interesting example of Gifford’s luminous wilderness imagery of the early 1860s, a group of paintings that refer to one of his most important exhibition pieces, In the Wilderness (Toledo Museum of Art). To the title of that painting, when exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1860, Gifford appended the line, “Home of the red brow’d hunter race” (from a poem by Lydia Sigourney, “The American Indians,” first published in London in 1837). In that painting one such provider is shown returning by canoe to his wife and child, the figures dwarfed by scenic grandeur, with forested land and a looming central mountain, half lost in air, mirrored in the still water. All the related paintings explore variations of that image.

“Gifford was aware that his early immigrant maternal ancestors (Starbucks) had lived amicably among the Indians of Massachusetts and had purchased land from them. He had painted wilderness views with Indians in the early 1850s, reflecting concepts published by Margaret Fuller in the 1840s and Henry Schoolcraft in the 1850s of American Indians as the ideal historic inhabitants of the pristine American landscape. Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha” (1855) inspired Gifford to travel to Nova Scotia in 1859 in search of its described Arcadian paradise. Disappointed in the scenery, he joined a group of Micmacs (Algonquins) for a pow wow, paddled in their canoes, and sketched them and their canoes and tepees; then went on to New Hampshire to find sufficiently idyllic settings into which to paint them.

“The painting under consideration is dominated by a conically peaked mountain recognizable as New Hampshire’s Mount Chocorua, viewed from Chocorua Lake at its base to the south, seen in early morning light. A chief in full regalia (correct Algonquin headdress and a blue-trimmed red coat, (the colors darkened by a brown shadow seen through the now transparent paint) kneels on a rocky height in the left foreground observing (or spying on) fourteen figures, skillfully evoked with tiny near-black marks and impasto dabs of warm white and red, arriving in four canoes (their direction indicated by trailing wakes). The beetling left foreground cliff, shaded with dark brown and strongly lit with warm white, provides a high-contrast, substantive foil for the aerial distance. Spiky, fallen dead tree trunks (a feature of several paintings by Gifford of c.1861) help bar the viewer (and surrogate chief) from the impalpable, elusive expanse. The gray-blue sky blends imperceptively towards pink in the direction of the (unseen) rising sun, emphasized by a dotted line of highlighted clouds, answered by smaller specks above. A nuanced progression of tone and color measures the density of luminous atmosphere, the brown-gray of nearer hills evolving stepwise to cooler grays as they recede into air. Salmon tinted morning light softly highlights landscape features, fades to barely reveal projecting forms on the gray mountain shoulder, and further approaches sky color on the peak. The effect of glowing air for which Gifford was and is still widely acclaimed is vividly evident in this painting.”