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A man sits on a sheer, rocky outcropping high above a sunlit expanse of land that stretches to meet a sun-dappled sea in this horizontal painting. The outcropping slopes in to fill the right half of the composition, and is partially carpeted by mustard-yellow, brown, and moss-green growth. Bright sunlight from the upper right glints off some of the craggy, steel-gray rock faces. The man is tiny in scale within the composition, and sits near the top right with his legs stretched out in front of him. He wears a denim-blue shirt, tan pants, and soft hat with a narrow brim. He appears to have red hair and a beard. He holds a white object in front of him, presumably paper or a notebook. Behind him an open box of paints and brushes sits near a camp stool with a closed white parasol planted next to it. A lower hill in the middle distance slopes in from the left side and disappears behind the outcroppingin the center of the composition. The hill is covered with muted and dark greens and yellows, suggesting a forest of pine trees. The hill descends to meet the flat, mauve-tinted land, which is crisscrossed with shallow fissures. In the distance, the area where the narrow band of powder-blue sea meets the sky, about three-quarters of the way up the canvas, is painted with a tan-colored haze. The artist signed the work in the lower right as if he had carved his name and the date into the rock. It reads, “S R Gifford 1865.”

Sanford Robinson Gifford

The Artist Sketching at Mount Desert, Maine, 1864-1865

West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 65

Medium

oil on canvas

Dimensions

overall: 27.9 x 48.3 cm (11 x 19 in.)

framed: 57.2 x 77.5 cm (22 1/2 x 30 1/2 in.)

Credit Line

Gift of Jo Ann and Julian Ganz, Jr. in honor of John Wilmerding

Accession Number

2004.99.1

Artists / Makers

Sanford Robinson Gifford (painter) American, 1823 - 1880

Image Use

This image is in the public domain.
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Inscription

lower right: S R Gifford / 1865 / mt. [?] / July 22, 1864

Provenance

The artist; possibly (sale, Artists' Fund Society by Leeds & Miner, New York, 29 December 1865, no. 50, as Green Mountain, Mt. Desert); Graham.[1] Possibly John Frederick Kensett [1816-1872], New York.[2] Possibly Miss A.M. Williams, Augusta, Maine, in 1881.[3] Lee Freedman, Southwest Harbor, Maine, in 1978. (Thomas Colville, New Haven); purchased 1979 by Jo Ann and Julian Ganz, Jr., Los Angeles;[4] gift (partial and promised) 2004 to NGA; gift completed 2008.

[1] Annotated copy of the sale catalogue, microfilm roll N429, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

[2] A painting titled A Study from Nature--Mt. Desert, included in the 1873 exhibition of works owned by Kensett, may be the NGA painting.

[3] A painting titled A View from Green Mountain, Mount Desert, Me. and owned by Miss Williams, which may be the NGA painting, was listed in 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, [Waldo S. Pratt], New York, 1881: no. 385.

[4] Provenance information for the late 1970s is from the 1981 catalogue for the exhibition of the Ganz collection.

Associated Names

Artists' Fund Society
Freedman, Lee
Ganz, Jr., Julian, Mr. and Mrs.
Kensett, John Frederick
Thomas Colville
Williams, A.M., Miss

Exhibition History

1865: Possibly Boston Athenaeum, 1865, no. 245, as From the Green Mountains--Mt. Desert.

1873: Possibly The Collection of Paintings of the Late Mr. John F. Kensett, National Academy of Design, New York, 1873, no. 789, as A Study from Nature--Mt. Desert.

1981: An American Perspective. Nineteenth-Century Art from the collection of Jo Ann & Julian Ganz, Jr., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Amon Carter Museum, Forth Worth; Los Angeles Museum of Art, 1981-1982, unnumbered catalogue, fig. 18.

1998: The Painted Sketch: American Impressions from Nature 1830-1880, Dallas Museum of Art; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, 1998-1999, no. 60, repro.

1999: Inventing Acadia: Artists and Tourists at Mount Desert, The Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine, 1999, unnumbered catalogue, fig. 67.

2003: Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2003-2004, no. 39, repro.

Bibliography

1881: Weir, John F. A Memorial Catalogue of the Paintings of Sanford Robinson Gifford, N.A., New York, 1881: no. 365, as A View from Green Mountain, Mount Desert, Me..

1979: The Magazine Antiques 116 (November 1979): 948, repro.

1985: Brown, Hilton. "Unfamiliar Views and Distant Lands: How Ten Artists Composed Design Elements to Make Interesting Paintings." American Artist (November 1985): 530-531, repro.

1987: Weiss, Ila. Poetic Landscape: The Art and Experience of Sanford R. Gifford. Newark, 1987: 246-247, pl. 20.

1991: Wilmerding, John. American Views: Essays on American Art. Princeton, 1991: 5, color pl. 1, fig. 2.

1994: Wilmerding, John. The Artist's Mount Desert: American Painters on the Maine Coast. Princeton, 1994: 131-133, fig. 132, frontispiece.

1995: Avery, Kevin J. The Panorama and Its Manifestation in American Landscape Painting, 1795-1870. Ph.D dissertation, Columbia University, New York, 1995: 361-363, fig. 171.

1998: Harvey, Eleanor Lewis Jones. "That Earlier, Wilder Image": Oil Sketches by American Landscape Painters, 1830-1880." Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, New Haven, 1998: 70-71, fig. 17.

1999: Katlan, Alexander. "The American Artist's Tools and Materials for On-Site Oil Sketching." Journal of the American Institute for Conservation 38, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 22.

2000: Belanger, Pamela J. Maine in America: American Art at The Farnsworth Art Museum. Rockland, Maine, 2000: 60.

2000: Skrapits, Joseph C. "Sacred Scenery." American Artist 64, no. 692 (March 2000): 26, 78, repro.