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拍品專文
Sanford Gifford’s final great painting of the Hudson River, Sunset Over the Palisades on the Hudson superbly exhibits the genius with color that defined luminist painting and established Gifford among the leaders of the Hudson River School. Attesting to this painting as a masterwork of Gifford’s career, the present work was featured on the catalogue cover of the 2003-04 exhibition Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, and Amon Carter Museum. Capturing a spectacular sunset over the dramatic cliffs, as a contemporary reviewer praised a closely related work, “Just here is seen an advantage which the painter has over the poet. Each would feel as keenly the effect of such beauty, but words could not reproduce that effect. What is needed is not a master of language, but a master of color.” (The New York Evening Post, April 21, 1877)
Gifford grew up in Hudson, New York, just across the river from Catskill, where Thomas Cole was establishing a new American landscape tradition. In 1857, Gifford established a studio in New York City’s Tenth Street Studio Building alongside Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Church and other prominent artists of the day. Throughout his career, the picturesque views along the Hudson River provided Gifford inspiration: “From 1866 to 1868, and again in 1878, he painted the Highlands, Hook Mountain, High Tor, Piermont, and other sites near or on the Tappan Zee and Haverstraw Bay, the widest points on the river. Only in the late 1870s did his range of subject matter expand to include the southernmost part of the Hudson near his home in New York City—as, for example, in A Sunset, Bay of New York [Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York], and Sunset Over the Palisades on the Hudson.” (Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford, New York, 2003, p. 28)
Indeed, it was not until 1875 to 1879 that Gifford seriously painted the steep cliffs of the Palisades along the Western side of the lower Hudson River. He completed a series of approximately seven paintings, including a now unlocated 1875 painting, which sold to a London collector from his memorial exhibition, and an 1877 National Academy exhibition piece. Two studies of the subject are currently in museum collections: Sunset on the Hudson (1876, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut) and The Palisades (1877, Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts).
In this present painting, Gifford demonstrates his wondrous skill with conveying not only the geography but also the emotional impact of this magnificent natural vista. As in his wonderful Isola Bella in Lago Maggiore—his Italian masterwork of 1871, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art—in this final great Hudson River painting, Gifford contrasts the dark masses of cliffs at left with a glowing sky reflected in crystalline waters. The work is a mastery in compositional design. As a contemporary reviewer described one of the works in the series, “the view is taken at a point where the Palisades end, the banks fall off and the river widens. The flood of radiance from the setting sun falls upon sky and river, the clouds glowing with the golden splendor, and the white sails on the placid water are lighted up in the far distance, while under the western bank the Palisades cast the sloops that are hugging the shore into deep shadow. It is a superb picture, and full of the rich, soft harmony of color that Gifford has at his command.” (“The New York Academy,” Boston Evening Transcript, April 13, 1877, p. 6)
Beyond its immediately evident beauty, Gifford’s composition also evokes poetic meaning. Franklin Kelly posits, “Boats with dark hulls and lighter sails move between the zone of light and dark almost as if in passage from one world to another…In Gifford's painting the boats may simply be boats, the river merely his beloved Hudson, and the light and color of the setting sun only an accurate record of the end of day and nothing more. However, if we, like his contemporaries, are to appreciate his achievement as the ‘exponent of that which is highest, fullest, ripest—most poetic and profound—in landscape,’ then perhaps we should also consider the possibility that he was offering us a moving meditation on life itself.” (Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford, p. 238)
It is this combination of literal and symbolic beauty that has attracted praise for Gifford’s Palisades pictures since their debut. As his contemporary, Henry Tuckerman, said of his works, “They do not dazzle, they win; they appeal to our calm and thoughtful appreciation.” (as quoted in American Art: An Exhibition from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd, San Francisco, California, 1976, p. 120) Indeed, Sunset Over the Palisades on the Hudson captures our imagination, demonstrating how Gifford has inspired generations to fully appreciate the magic of the American landscape in its full luminist glow.
The present work was painted by Gifford for his alma mater, the Hudson Academy, and dedicated on the reverse to the school with a date of June 1879. The artist had encountered the school’s principal, Reverend William D. Perry, on a ferry to Hudson, and he ‘suggested’ to Gifford ‘that the pupils of the Academy would certainly be stimulated to more earnest efforts if they could have continually before them some examples of the work that had made some of the former pupils of the Academy famous.’ Not long afterward he received [the present work] accompanied by a note ‘expressing his interest in the Academy and its work; and his pleasure at being able to start the movement of which we had spoken.’” (as quoted in Poetic Landscape, p. 156)
The work subsequently entered the collection of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd in 1973, hanging at their Fieldwood Farm estate along the Hudson River and remaining there under the care of their daughter Sandra Ferry Rockefeller until the present day.
Gifford grew up in Hudson, New York, just across the river from Catskill, where Thomas Cole was establishing a new American landscape tradition. In 1857, Gifford established a studio in New York City’s Tenth Street Studio Building alongside Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Church and other prominent artists of the day. Throughout his career, the picturesque views along the Hudson River provided Gifford inspiration: “From 1866 to 1868, and again in 1878, he painted the Highlands, Hook Mountain, High Tor, Piermont, and other sites near or on the Tappan Zee and Haverstraw Bay, the widest points on the river. Only in the late 1870s did his range of subject matter expand to include the southernmost part of the Hudson near his home in New York City—as, for example, in A Sunset, Bay of New York [Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York], and Sunset Over the Palisades on the Hudson.” (Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford, New York, 2003, p. 28)
Indeed, it was not until 1875 to 1879 that Gifford seriously painted the steep cliffs of the Palisades along the Western side of the lower Hudson River. He completed a series of approximately seven paintings, including a now unlocated 1875 painting, which sold to a London collector from his memorial exhibition, and an 1877 National Academy exhibition piece. Two studies of the subject are currently in museum collections: Sunset on the Hudson (1876, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut) and The Palisades (1877, Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts).
In this present painting, Gifford demonstrates his wondrous skill with conveying not only the geography but also the emotional impact of this magnificent natural vista. As in his wonderful Isola Bella in Lago Maggiore—his Italian masterwork of 1871, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art—in this final great Hudson River painting, Gifford contrasts the dark masses of cliffs at left with a glowing sky reflected in crystalline waters. The work is a mastery in compositional design. As a contemporary reviewer described one of the works in the series, “the view is taken at a point where the Palisades end, the banks fall off and the river widens. The flood of radiance from the setting sun falls upon sky and river, the clouds glowing with the golden splendor, and the white sails on the placid water are lighted up in the far distance, while under the western bank the Palisades cast the sloops that are hugging the shore into deep shadow. It is a superb picture, and full of the rich, soft harmony of color that Gifford has at his command.” (“The New York Academy,” Boston Evening Transcript, April 13, 1877, p. 6)
Beyond its immediately evident beauty, Gifford’s composition also evokes poetic meaning. Franklin Kelly posits, “Boats with dark hulls and lighter sails move between the zone of light and dark almost as if in passage from one world to another…In Gifford's painting the boats may simply be boats, the river merely his beloved Hudson, and the light and color of the setting sun only an accurate record of the end of day and nothing more. However, if we, like his contemporaries, are to appreciate his achievement as the ‘exponent of that which is highest, fullest, ripest—most poetic and profound—in landscape,’ then perhaps we should also consider the possibility that he was offering us a moving meditation on life itself.” (Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford, p. 238)
It is this combination of literal and symbolic beauty that has attracted praise for Gifford’s Palisades pictures since their debut. As his contemporary, Henry Tuckerman, said of his works, “They do not dazzle, they win; they appeal to our calm and thoughtful appreciation.” (as quoted in American Art: An Exhibition from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd, San Francisco, California, 1976, p. 120) Indeed, Sunset Over the Palisades on the Hudson captures our imagination, demonstrating how Gifford has inspired generations to fully appreciate the magic of the American landscape in its full luminist glow.
The present work was painted by Gifford for his alma mater, the Hudson Academy, and dedicated on the reverse to the school with a date of June 1879. The artist had encountered the school’s principal, Reverend William D. Perry, on a ferry to Hudson, and he ‘suggested’ to Gifford ‘that the pupils of the Academy would certainly be stimulated to more earnest efforts if they could have continually before them some examples of the work that had made some of the former pupils of the Academy famous.’ Not long afterward he received [the present work] accompanied by a note ‘expressing his interest in the Academy and its work; and his pleasure at being able to start the movement of which we had spoken.’” (as quoted in Poetic Landscape, p. 156)
The work subsequently entered the collection of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd in 1973, hanging at their Fieldwood Farm estate along the Hudson River and remaining there under the care of their daughter Sandra Ferry Rockefeller until the present day.