The Death of Sanford Gifford

Editor's Note: This story by Andrew Amelinckx originally appeared in the Oct. 9, 2010 weekend edition of the register-Star Newspaper. It has been altered from its original form.


The sun shone through the trees in the Hudson Cemetery and a light breeze carried the smells of summer, on this, the last day of August. Several of the men who bore the remains of their friend were more inclined towards wielding brushes than bodies and represented, along with a number of those in the large crowd, some of the best known painters of America’s first great art movement, the Hudson River School. They were there to bury one of their own, Sanford Robinson Gifford.

Many had come by train from New York City where Gifford had spent a good part of his later life and where he had died two days earlier, on Aug. 29, 1880, of malarial fever. While he possibly contracted the disease during a trip to Minnesota, in mid-19th century America malaria was prevalent across the country, including in New York City.

Writing to his mother while he lay in bed, burning with fever, he told her “he was happy, ready to die and had the consciousness of having done his duty as he understood it” and going on to say that his “faith in immortality was strong and settled.”

Among his friends who bore his body to the grave that summer day was Jervis McEntee, a fellow painter who had traveled with Gifford in Europe in 1868 during a trip that would eventually result in the creation of a painting that Gifford considered his crowning achievement—“The Ruins of the Parthenon.” The painting of the famous Greek temple in Athens brilliantly displays Gifford’s ability to paint light and atmosphere, in a style that would come to be called “Luminism.” The artist himself said the work wasn’t a painting of a building, but of a day.

Like most of his fellow Hudson River School artists Gifford created his larger works based on sketches made out in the field, and also like those fellow artists, he traveled extensively both in America and abroad.

Gifford made several trips with Worthington Whittredge, another well-known artist of the Hudson River School, traveling in Europe in the mid-1850s and the western US in 1870. That sad summer day in 1880 Whittredge would be another of Gifford’s pallbearers.

Gifford had met many of the men he would call friends and artistic peers at the Tenth Street Studio Building, located at 51 West 10th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in Manhattan. Built in 1857 it would become the center of the American art world for the next half-century. Among his contemporaries who had a studio there was Frederic Church, one of the best known of the Hudson River School Artists whose stately mansion, Olana, still stands today in Greenport, NY. Church had also been on the European excursion that Gifford had taken with McEntee and McEntee’s wife in the late 1860s.

Church, called “an intimate friend of the deceased” by the Hudson Republican Newspaper, was in attendance at Gifford’s funeral as well.

The day began with a 3 p.m. service held at the Gifford Family home at 337 Diamond St. in Hudson. Gifford’s father,Elihu, was a wealthy industrialist who in 1823, the year of Gifford’s birth, bought into an iron foundry in Hudson, which he renamed Starbuck, Gifford and Company. He would go on to organize the Farmers’ Bank and serve as its first president as well as founding the Hudson and Berkshire Railroad. His wife was the first director of the Hudson Orphan Asylum and a professor of religion. According to McEntee, Gifford’s mother had hoped that he would have also followed that pursuit. But it seemed Gifford was destined to become an artist.

Born in Saratoga County,NY., Gifford grew up in Hudson, NY., in the proverbial shadow of Thomas Cole, the man regarded as the founder of the Hudson River School who lived in Catskill.

After attending the Hudson Academy Gifford spent two years at Brown University before moving to Manhattan to study art in 1845. His career followed a straight path to the National Academy, the center of American art at the time, where he first showed work in 1847. His life was devoted to art and he continued to paint even as he served in the Civil War. Gifford was a corporal in the Union Army’s 7th Regiment of the New York Militia from 1861 to 1863.

He was a tall, thin, dark-haired man whose character was, as defined by a friend after the artist’s death, “serene and placid, resting on resources within himself,” but whose placid exterior harbored a “depth…that flowed within, whose floods, and swirls, and eddies often caught him from the light and carried him into cavernous depths of shade."

Perhaps McEntee was thinking only of his friend’s exterior when he wrote, “the face of the dead reflected the whole life and bade all look upon Gifford’s serene and hopeful and contented face.”

The funeral service was officiated by the Rev. W.H. Bellows, a well-known Unitarian minister from New York City, who commented afterwards “it was fitting that the painter of the summer should go to his rest on this last beautiful day of the summer.”

The other pallbearers who helped lay Gifford in the ground included artists R.W. Hubbard and John F. Weir. The final man carrying Gifford’s casket was Richard Butler, who was one of Gifford’s major collectors and through whom Gifford’s work can still be seen thanks to the donation of his paintings to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which held an exhibition that autumn featuring 160 of the artist’s 700 known works.

A brilliant sunset: art and the atmosphere

The first time I saw the paintings of Frederic Church I was struck by the brilliant, almost garish colors in such compositions as his Twilight in the Wilderness from 1860. I had always assumed Church, along with the other Hudson River School painters, were exaggerating for effect, much like the German Expressionists had.

But when my wife and I moved from Brooklyn to Catskill, a small town in New York's Hudson Valley, I realized I was wrong. One day, just after we had moved up, I was driving from the east side of the Hudson River, just outside of the city of Hudson, heading back across the Rip Van Winkle Bridge to Catskill when I nearly drove off the road. The sky looked like it was on fire. It was an explosion of alizarin crimson, eggplant purple, lemon yellow and a hundred shades of orange, with a deep electric blue peaking through in places. The usually brown Hudson River reflected the sky, mellowing the colors and complimenting the scene.

A few months later, my wife and a I were eating at a riverfront restaurant in Athens, on the west side of the Hudson, when we witnessed a similar scene. Just across the river in Columbia County, the tree-covered hills suddenly turned from a dull green to a riot of reds and oranges just as the sun began to set. The shift was so sudden it didn't seem real.

The quality of light and atmospheric fireworks of the Hudson Valley drew a loose affiliation of 19th century landscape painters that would become known as the Hudson River School to the area and ushered in the (arguably) most important contribution to world culture by 19th century America. The attraction to the the land was so great that the two leading painters of the school—Church and Thomas Cole—permanently settled in the area.

The connection between the atmospheric peculiarities of a place in relation to the output of a painter working there is vital to understanding any given piece of art.

One can't look at the paintings of Henri Matisse that were produced in the south of France without understanding that he went there specifically for the light. His time spent there transformed his canvases, altering his palette for the rest of his life. In 1917 he permanently settled near Nice.

The relationship between palette and place extends beyond figurative painting. The later work of Willem De Kooning—one of the great 20th century masters—is a good example. When he left Manhattan in 1963 and moved out to East Hampton, at the end of Long Island, his colors lightened. The forms, as if bathed in light, lost the hard linear quality of his earlier work.

I was recently discussing this subject with an attorney I know, who said he wished that his art professors in college would have explained this to him, since it seems to be a large part of the picture (literally).