September 6, 2017

The Magazine Antiques ran an effusive article reviewing the Thomas Cole House exhibition of Sanford Robinson Gifford’s paintings of the Adirondacks. Bruce Weber writes:

“Among members of the Hudson River School of painting, Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823–1880) has long been considered one of the most brilliant painters of light and air. His art is the subject of the intimate, beautifully curated exhibition Sanford R. Gifford in the Catskills on view through October 29th at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, New York. Kevin J. Avery, a major specialist in the art of the Hudson River School, curated this showing of eighteen paintings of the region dating from 1846–1878, which range from Gifford’s earliest extant painting, a view of the famous Kaaterskill Falls in the Kaaterskill Clove gorge to View Near Kauterskill [sic, per the nineteenth-century spelling of the name], painted in 1878 when he was nearing the end of his life and adopted a looser and more painterly style. The exhibition purports to be the largest showing of Gifford’s work to be held so close to his childhood home in Hudson, the recently revitalized city laying directly across the Hudson River from Catskill, the home of pioneering landscape painter and dean of the Hudson River School Thomas Cole from 1825–1847.”