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Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection SANFORD ROBINSON GIFFORD (1823-1880) Stelvio ...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:30,000.00 - 50,000.00 USD
Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection SANFORD ROBINSON GIFFORD (1823-1880) Stelvio ...
Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection
SANFORD ROBINSON GIFFORD
(1823-1880)
Stelvio Road by Lago di Como, 1868
inscribed "Stelvio Road Aug 6 1868 Como" (lower center)
oil on canvas
9 3/4 x 8 in. (25.1 x 20.6 cm)
<p> Estimate: $30,000-50,000 <p> Provenance
Estate of the artist Gifford Estate Sale, Chickering Hall, New York, April 11 and 12, 1881, lot 58, no. 506 Paul Gifford Jo Ann and Julian Ganz, Jr., California Hirschl & Adler Galleries, Inc., New York Andrew Crispo Gallery, New York, 1980 Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Lugano, Switzerland,1980 <p> Exhibited
New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Memorial Collection of the Works of the Late Sanford R. Gifford, 1880-1881 <p> Literature
New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, A Memorial Catalogue of Paintings of Sanford Robinson Gifford, N.A., New York, 1881, no. 506 Ila Weiss, "Sanford Robinson Gifford in Europe: A Sketchbook of 1868," The American Art Journal, IX/2, November 1977, p. 96, fn. 46 Ila Weiss, Sanford Gifford (1823-1880), New York, 1977, pp. 324-325 Ila Weiss, "Poetic Landscape, The Art and Experience of Sanford R. Gifford," Newark, London, Toronto, 1987, p. 314 (illustrated) Barbara Novak, The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection: Nineteenth-Century American Painting, London, 1986, pp. 146-147, no. 38 (illustrated, p. 147) <p> In June of 1868, Gifford embarked upon his second and final extended trip abroad. His journey lasted well over a year and included visits to Italy, Greece, and the Near East. While exploring northern Italy during the summer months, Gifford composed the sketches and oil studies such as the present work, upon which he would later base several of his finest compositions, including Tivoli,1870 and Isola Bella in Lago Maggiore, 1871, both in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. <p> The summer of 1868 was a seminal moment in Gifford's career, setting the tone for the accomplishments of the last phase of his production before his early death in 1880. As one of America's preeminent painters in the luminist mode, Gifford's fascination with the intricacies of light and atmosphere are reaffirmed in the present work. Meanwhile, however, the vigor and immediacy of his brushwork in this composition point the way ahead, as he reconsidered the utter stillness that also distinguished American luminism. As scholar Barbara Novak and others have observed, the coherence of the luminist aesthetic began to deteriorate following the end of the Civil War. In this work, we see clearly how the painterly sketch provided Gifford with a model for his late style. The present work is a preparatory pochade for one of Gifford's best-documented compositions: Galleries of the Stelvio, Lake Como, 1878, (Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica, New York). In conjunction with a preparatory pencil sketch in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum of Art and an 1870 intermediary oil study, the present work offers insight into the artist's working methods and his talent for working in situ. Over time, as the later versions attest, the artist "sacrificed geographic accuracy to gain a greater expanse of luminous, misty distance to contrast with the substantive masses of the tunnels and road."1 Even in the present work, painted just a day after his first visit to the site on August 5th, the artist has adjusted the heights of mountains to accentuate their verticality and widened the aperture of the gallery in which he stands. The pentimenti of the artist's original pencil lines appear distinctly in this composition, showing how he lowered the first rank of distant peaks and elevated the second to accentuate the contrast, while also redrawing the contour of the cave wall so that more light and atmosphere enter the composition. That tendency toward more light and air proved the more alluring, as the final version of 1878 attests. We are grateful to Mark Mitchell for cataloguing this lot. <p> Notes 1 Ila Weiss, "Sanford R. Gifford in Europe: A Sketchbook of 1868," American Art Journal IX/2, 1977, p. 96.
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