Mansfield Nose

In the summer of 1858, after a two-year sojourn in Europe, Sanford Robinson Gifford embarked on his first American sketching tour since returning from abroad. Gifford and fellow artists Richard Hubbard and Jerome Thompson traveled to the Green Mountains of Vermont and, in August, they climbed Mansfield Mountain, where Gifford made a series of sketches in preparation for an exhibition picture. When it was shown at the National Academy of Design, the resulting monumental masterwork, Mansfield Mountain (1859, Private Collection), reestablished Gifford’s reputation as a leading landscape painter of the era and earned him such praise as “the most poetical of our American artists, whose pictures are like poet’s dreams.” (as quoted in Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford, exhibition catalogue, New York, 2003, p. 109) Dated the same year, the present related work likewise captures the sublime majesty of the Vermont landscape with Gifford’s characteristic crystalline light and poetic atmospheric perspective. Featuring the artist and his dog on the cliff as in the larger work, Mansfield Nose invites the viewer to join the explorers and experience the awesome beauty of the American landscape that Gifford himself witnessed.

According to a contemporary report, Gifford and his friends were the first artists to have sketched from Mount Mansfield and “they pronounce[d] the place equal in interest to Mount Washington, and in every way a charming spot.” (as quoted in Hudson River School Visions, p. 108) At the time of Gifford’s travels in 1858, the two-story Summit House was constructed on Mansfield Mountain, and the carriage path and hotel greatly enhanced the number of visitors to the peak, changing the mountain from a place of solitude to a place of public accommodation. However, Gifford's paintings inspired by the region are intentionally nostalgic views of the mountain in its wild state. Indeed, wielding artistic license, in the present work Gifford concentrates on the ‘Nose’ peak of Mansfield’s face-like formation and, rather than depicting man’s intervention into the landscape, he adds a placid body of water below the distinctive mount. The sheer beauty of his painted landscape underscores his primary interest in capturing an untouched, natural landscape—a metaphor for America as a promised land.

The transcendent perfection of Mansfield Nose draws from Gifford’s adept execution, minimizing the hand of the artist and infusing the scene with an inner light. The unique geography of the mountain is executed in a nuanced palette of greens, grays and ochres, seamlessly blended to capture the contours of the peak overlain with vegetation. Dr. Ila Weiss writes, “The Nose’s large triangular shape of flat, cool gray shadow is intriguingly articulated as cliffs where touched by the raking, warm afternoon light.” (unpublished letter, 2019) Surrounding the main Nose feature are the outlines of the surrounding range, forming precisely delineated layers in faded hues that seem to almost, but not quite, blend into the clear blue sky. As a critic for The Home Journal described the related exhibition painting, in the present work too, “The subject is one of immense difficulty as the gradation of color and aerial perspective is so subtle, and at the same time the forms are so varied and full, it is scarcely within the province of Art to more than suggest so extensive a panorama.” (as quoted in Hudson River School Visions, p. 109) In this way, the present work draws upon many of the themes of the Luminist movement. Perhaps it was the inherent spirituality within the present composition that attracted one of its original owners A.A. Willits, a prominent Presbyterian Reverend, to acquire the work no later than 1890-94. The painting has descended in his family to the present day.

Yet, at the same time, Mansfield Nose remains grounded in reality and forges a connection with the viewer through the inclusion of the beautifully rendered figure in profile, leaning on the barrel of his rifle as he gazes out at the stunning vista with his hiking companion. The artist and his pet are depicted from behind in the final exhibition work as well as a sketch in the George Walter Vincent Smith Museum, Springfield, Massachusetts. As a critic of 1859 reflected, “You seem to stand with those figures on the stern, splintered ridge, and gaze over through the bright mist that fills the yawning abyss, at the swelling mountain chain that soars up cloud-like into, rather than against the sky.” (Ballou’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, August 20, 1859)