American Art Collaborative

A major Hudson River school painter with extensive European experience, Gifford traveled west several times. In 1870 he joined F. V. Hayden's geological survey to Wyoming, leaving his two artist-companions, John F. Kensett and Worthington Whittredge, behind in Denver. Gifford produced only a few western landscape subjects (see his Valley of the Chugwater, which may be compared with a photograph by William H. Jackson of Gifford painting the scene. Gifford journeyed to the Northwest Coast in 1874, visiting Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska. Again he seems to have been more interested in the experience rather than in painting; only a few works have survived from this trip.

References

Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823-1880) (Austin: University of Texas Art Museum, 1970); Metropolitan Museum of Art, Memorial Catalogue of the Paintings of Sanford Robinson Gifford, NA, with a Biography and Critical Essay by Prof. John F. Weir of the Yale School of Fine Arts (1881; New York: Olana Gallery, 1974); Weiss, Poetic Landscapes.

William Truettner, ed The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920 (Washington, D.C. and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991