
Hudson River School and Luminist painter Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823-1880) made light itself the subject of his atmospheric landscapes, earning his technique the name "air painting." Born in Greenfield, New York, to a prosperous iron foundry family, he attended Brown University for two years before leaving to study art in New York City with the English watercolorist John Rubens Smith. Though trained as a portrait painter, Gifford exhibited his first landscape at the National Academy in 1847 and thereafter devoted himself to the genre, becoming one of the finest second-generation Hudson River School artists.
Gifford's art drew inspiration from Thomas Cole and J.M.W. Turner, enriched by European travels in 1855-57 and 1868-69. He made each scene's ambient light, color-saturated and atmospherically potent, the key to its expression, often painting the sun directly as it filtered through haze. From 1858, he rented studio Number 19 in the Tenth Street Studio Building, where his neighbors included Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Church, and Worthington Whittredge. An avid angler and outdoorsman, Gifford joined F.V. Hayden's 1870 geological survey to Wyoming and later traveled to the Pacific Northwest, Oregon, and Alaska. He died unexpectedly in 1880 at age fifty-six from a respiratory ailment contracted on a Lake Superior fishing trip. As a founder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he was honored with the institution's first monographic retrospective in 1881. His luminous landscapes hang at the Met, the National Gallery of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
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