Sanford Robinson Gifford 1823-1880

D. H. McAlpin, New York
Hillary Smart, Boston, Massachusetts
Vose Galleries, Boston
Acquired from the above, 1976

New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Memorial Collection of the Works of the Late Sanford R. Gifford, October 1880-March 1881, no. 44, p. 6 (as Lago Garda, Italy)
Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art; Fort Worth, Texas, Amon Carter Museum; Los Angeles, California, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, An American Perspective: Nineteenth-Century Art from the Collection of Jo Ann and Julian Ganz, Jr., October 1981-September 1982, p. 130, illustrated in color p. 89
Boston, Massachusetts, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Cleveland, Ohio, The Cleveland Museum of Fine Art; Houston, Texas, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Lure of Italy: American Artists and The Italian Experience 1760-1914, September 1992-August 1993, no. 63, p. 299, illustrated in color
New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Fort Worth, Texas, Amon Carter Museum; Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford, October 2003-June 2004, no. 33, pp. 156, illustrated in color (as Lago di Garda, Italy)

A Memorial Catalogue of the Paintings of Sanford Robinson Gifford, N.A., with a biographical and critical essay by Prof. John F. Weir, of the Yale School of Fine Arts, New York, 1881, reprinted 1974, no. 342, p. 28
Ila Weiss, Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823-1880), New York, 1968, reprinted 1977, p. xxxii,n.
Ila Weiss, Poetic Landscape: The Art and Experience of Sanford Robinson Gifford, Newark, Delaware, 1987, p. 239, illustrated p. 240

Good condition; lined; under UV: thumbprint-size area of retouch at center-right edge with a cluster of dots and dashes, a few other isolated dots and dashes of retouch in sky and to the left of the mountain, some inpainting along edges to address frame abrasion.
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On July 23, 1857, towards the end of Sanford Robinson Gifford's two year European tour, he left Venice to visit the northern lake district of Italy. He boarded an Austrian steamer in Peschiera, at the base of Lake Garda (Lago di Garda), to travel the thirty four mile length of the lake north to Riva, the Austrian city at its northern tip.  He noted his first impressions in a letter to his father: "The west shore approaching Riva is very bold and precipitous." He took a walk along the steep slopes of the shore on "Brescia Road which winds along the face of the precipices, often hollowed out of the perpendicular rock at a great height above the water." Reaching an apex south of Riva, he sketched the city that was "finely situated at the head of the lake in an amphitheatre of noble mountains." Gifford's trip north afforded him views of the Tyrolean Alps and he was particularly enchanted by the "very pure and beautiful blue" lake whose opalescent light and still reflections he captured with a luminous palette of pale hues.

Franklin Kelly writes "Gifford's on-site study of Riva is lost and no other depictions of the subject predating this example are known. ... [In the present work] Gifford's meticulous recording of the buildings makes a number of them easily identifiable, including the tall structure at the left, Torre di Apponale, which was built in 1220 for defense of the town and later raised in height and extensively modified [into a clocktower]. At the far right is the multi-towered castle known as the Rocca, first constructed in the twelfth century and renovated and enlarged several times since. Seen between these two, but slightly further inland, is the south flank of the church of Santa Maria Assunta, begun in the early twelfth century but completely redecorated in 1728" (Hudson River School Visions, 2004, p. 156).

Gifford returned a second time to the northern lake region of Italy between 1868 and 1869.  He wrote to his father during this second tour: "The exquisite blue of the water, the noble forms of the mountains, the tender hues of the mountains as they melted in the tender gray of the sky contrasting strongly with the rich vineyards and bright villas of the near shore made a charming picture to carry away in one's memory" (Letter dated August 10^th, 1857, European Letters, vol. 2, pp. 175-6).