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Property from a Midwestern collector SANFORD ROBINSON GIFFORD (1823-1880) A Sketch of Mount C...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:250,000.00 - 350,000.00 USD
Property from a Midwestern collector SANFORD ROBINSON GIFFORD (1823-1880) A Sketch of Mount C...
Property from a Midwestern collector
SANFORD ROBINSON GIFFORD
(1823-1880)
A Sketch of Mount Chocorua
signed "S.R. Gifford" (lower right)
oil on canvas
9 3/8 x 15 1/2 in. (23.8 x 39.4 cm)
painted circa 1854-1863<p> Estimate: $250,000-350,000 <p> Provenance
The artist, 1863 Private Collection, Midwest <p> Exhibited
New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Memorial Collection of the Works of the Late Sanford R. Gifford, 1880-1881, no 339 <p> Literature
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, A Memorial Catalogue of the Paintings of Sanford Robinson Gifford, N.A., New York, 1881, no. 339, p. 28 (as sold in 1863) <p> A letter from Dr. Ila Weiss dated Febrary 19, 2001, confirming the inclusion of this work in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné will accompany this lot. <p> Color hovers in Gifford's paintings. It is not only an effect or quality of the sunlight, but, in his finest works, such as Kauterskill Clove, 1862 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art), A Home in the Wilderness, 1866 (Cleveland Museum of Art), and Twilight on Hunter Mountain, 1866 (Private Collection), it seems attached to the very air. A Sketch of Mount Chocorua displays the same radiant luminosity. From a high prospect across the lake, we see the familiar conical form of Mount Chocorua in the distance. It is late afternoon; the lowering sun glances across the mountain's flanks and catches the autumnal browns of oaks and the shimmering yellows of birches at the right. The clouds at the horizon fade to an only slightly richer shade of rose than does the sky. Deep, lengthening shadows complete the effect of stillness and serenity. A large, brightly lit boulder in the foreground serves to unify the composition by paralleling the diagonals of lakeshore and mountain slope, and by pointing the viewer towards the two figures on the path, a man and his child walking into the woods. A herd of sheep in the middle distance hints at an Arcadian theme, but, while the boulder's columnar form might also suggest older views of Arcady with their ruins, its reference now seems to be to the far more ancient structures of creation itself. The painting, with its sophisticated composition, effulgent color and light, and mood of optimism, epitomizes Gifford's contributions to nineteenth-century American landscape art. <p> Dr. Ila Weiss speculates that Gifford first developed A Sketch of Mount Chocorua as a study for his Summer Afternoon of 1855, but that he refined and completed this painting some time after his return from his first trip to Europe in 1857, in anticipation of his Mount Chocorua of 1863. <p> We are grateful to Dr. Bruce Chambers for cataloguing this lot.
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