A Twilight in the Catskills

Sanford Robinson Gifford painted light rather than scenery. The mountains, valleys and shorelines in his pictures are often unremarkable in themselves. What holds them together is atmosphere, a warm haze that softens distance and turns the whole canvas one temperature. He is usually grouped with the Hudson River School, and he travelled the expected routes, the Catskills, the Adirondacks, then Europe and the Middle East. But he worked smaller and quieter than Church or Bierstadt, with none of their appetite for spectacle. The term Luminism gets applied to this side of American landscape painting, though Gifford never used it. He served in the Union army during the Civil War and painted several camp scenes, which sit oddly beside the serene landscapes. His studio practice was methodical: small oil sketches made outdoors, then larger versions worked up indoors, often years later.