Join us for a free virtual talk on August 29 at 6 PM Central. This Virtual Symposium is free and open to the public. Dr. Franklin Kelly, Senior Curator and Christiane Ellis Valone Curator of American Paintings at the National Gallery of Art, will share about American painter Sanford Gifford (1823-1880), including Gifford’s Autumn in the Catskills, part of our permanent collection.
REGISTER ON ZOOM HERE.
ABOUT THE SYMPOSIUM:
During the middle of the nineteenth century, landscape painting became the most important form of art in the United States. Artists of the Hudson River School—a loosely associated group of painters including Asher B. Durand, Frederic Edwin Church, and Albert Bierstadt who were inspired by the pioneering works of Thomas Cole—enjoyed great critical and popular success for their works celebrating the scenery of the Northeast and the West in America, the tropics of Central and South America, and the Old World of Europe. Sanford Gifford (1823-1880), the only artist of the school who was actually born in the Hudson River Valley, created some of the most beautiful and refined landscape paintings by any artist of the era in America.
Gifford’s contemporaries, recognizing how distinctive, unique, and personal his vision of landscape was, often compared his art to poetry. As one observed:
Both the painter and the poet strive to reproduce the impressions which they have received from the beautiful things in nature….If these impressions can be reproduced in words, it is the business of the poet to reproduce them. If they are subtle and elude the grasp of words, it is the business of the painter to reproduce them.
This lecture will provide an overview of Gifford’s artistic career and also examine closely a number of key works—including the radiant Autumn in the Catskills in the Parthenon’s collection—to reveal just what it was that made his distinctively beautiful paintings unique and so unmistakably his own.