Sanford Robinson Gifford 1823 - 1880

From 1866 to 1868, Gifford painted sites on or near the Tappan Zee and Haverstraw Bay, the widest points of the Hudson River, where the vast expanse of water and the grand landscape offer a pristine view. Near these areas the Hudson is three miles wide and flanked by the steep bluffs of the Palisades Ridge and the Hudson Valley. Painted from the shore near Sing Sing Penitentiary, Haverstraw Bay (Shad Fishing on the Hudson) looks northwest from Ossining, New York. The distant landfall is High Tor, also known as Vogel Mountain, which rises more then eight hundred and thirty feet above the river at its highest point. In Haverstraw Bay, a veil of silence settles over the view as shad boats rest idly and two fishermen haul their nets amidst a morning haze. Gifford warms the composition with pink tones, the boats and white sails along the distant shoreline delicately counterbalancing the powerful presence of High Tor. Gifford completed the work in 1868 and, as Ila Weiss writes, "the painting was probably the last in a series of the subject whose largest version, Morning on Haverstraw Bay in the Hudson (Terra Foundation for the Arts, Daniel J. Terra Collection, Chicago), was dated 1866" (Sanford Robinson Gifford, New York, 1977, p. 272).