Camping for the Night on Mansfield Mountain

In the summer of 1858, after a two-year sojourn in Europe, Sanford Robinson Gifford embarked on his first American sketching tour since returning home. 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, such as Mt. Mansfield (1858, Springfield Museums, Massachusetts), in preparation for an exhibition picture. 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) Likely painted in the early 1860s, the present work marks a fascinating shift from the grand, mountainous views that Gifford painted of the vista, instead favoring a strikingly intimate nocturne illuminated by glowing firelight.

Of the present work, Ila Weiss writes: “The projecting rock above the shelter is reminiscent of those in the Mount Mansfield views of 1858-1859. Although the last known trip to Mansfield was in 1859, this painting seems to be related to an 1863 group, suggesting an unrecorded visit, perhaps an extension of the Adirondacks trip of that year.” (Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823-1880), PhD diss., Columbia University, New York, 1977, p. 243)

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 American sketching tour of 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. Rather than emphasizing these new adaptations, Camping for the Night on Mansfield Mountain focuses on a quiet moment of rest and solitude within the majestic Vermont landscape. Indeed, not even the “moon competes with the firelight in the mountain camp scene, and the intimate nature-mood is a contrast to that of the Civil War spectacle” prevalent in other works of this period. (I. Weiss, Sanford Robinson Gifford, p. 244)

Illuminated only by the campfire at center and the Big Dipper constellation in the sky, the present work commemorates a location that Gifford often depicted in a new manner. Heightened by the subtleties of light and the three figures huddled around the shelter, the composition reflects an intimacy not seen in the artist’s monumental landscapes of Vermont. Striking in its delicate, careful handling and skillful depiction of nocturnal light, Camping for the Night reflects a rare version of Gifford’s style, revealing the many facets of his artistic practice.

The present work was previously owned by famous American conservationist Gifford Pinchot, likely having descended to him from his father James W. Pinchot, a wealthy merchant and friend of the artist. Gifford Pinchot was responsible for the founding of the Yale School of Forestry and served as the first Chief of the United States Forest Service, nominated to the position by his close friend President Theodore Roosevelt. In this capacity, Pinchot, together with Roosevelt, contributed significantly to the management and protection of millions of acres of public land by the federal government. An avid outdoorsman, Sanford Gifford’s intimate scene of a mountaintop campfire would have been intimately familiar to this famed American environmentalist.