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Sanford Robinson Gifford
The Artist Sketching at Mount Desert, Maine
overall: 27.9 x 48.3 cm (11 x 19 in.)
framed: 57.2 x 77.5 cm (22 1/2 x 30 1/2 in.)
Gift of Jo Ann and Julian Ganz, Jr. in honor of John Wilmerding
On View: West Building, Main Floor - Gallery 65
lower right: S R Gifford / 1865 / mt. [?] / July 22, 1864
The artist; possibly (sale, Artists' Fund Society by Leeds & Miner, New York, 29 December 1865, no. 50, as Green Mountain, Mt. Desert); Graham.[1] Possibly John Frederick Kensett [1816-1872], New York.[2] Possibly Miss A.M. Williams, Augusta, Maine, in 1881.[3] Lee Freedman, Southwest Harbor, Maine, in 1978. (Thomas Colville, New Haven); purchased 1979 by Jo Ann and Julian Ganz, Jr., Los Angeles;[4] gift (partial and promised) 2004 to NGA.
[1] Annotated copy of the sale catalogue, microfilm roll N429, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
[2] A painting titled A Study from Nature--Mt. Desert, included in the 1873 exhibition of works owned by Kensett, may be the NGA painting.
[3] A painting titled A View from Green Mountain, Mount Desert, Me. and owned by Miss Williams, which may be the NGA painting, was listed in A Memorial Catalogue of the Paintings of Sanford Robinson Gifford, N.A., with a Biographical and Critical Essay by Prof. John F. Weir, of the Yale School of Fine Arts, [Waldo S. Pratt], New York, 1881: no. 385.
[4] Provenance information for the late 1970s is from the 1981 catalogue for the exhibition of the Ganz collection.
Possibly Boston Athenaeum, 1865, no. 245, as From the Green Mountains--Mt. Desert.
Possibly The Collection of Paintings of the Late Mr. John F. Kensett, National Academy of Design, New York, 1873, no. 789, as A Study from Nature--Mt. Desert.
An American Perspective. Nineteenth-Century Art from the collection of Jo Ann & Julian Ganz, Jr., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Amon Carter Museum, Forth Worth; Los Angeles Museum of Art, 1981-1982, unnumbered catalogue, fig. 18.
The Painted Sketch: American Impressions from Nature 1830-1880, Dallas Museum of Art; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, 1998-1999, no. 60, repro.
Inventing Acadia: Artists and Tourists at Mount Desert, The Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine, 1999, unnumbered catalogue, fig. 67.
Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2003-2004, no. 39, repro.
Weir, John F. A Memorial Catalogue of the Paintings of Sanford Robinson Gifford, N.A., New York, 1881: no. 365, as A View from Green Mountain, Mount Desert, Me..
The Magazine Antiques 116 (November 1979): 948, repro.
Brown, Hilton. "Unfamiliar Views and Distant Lands: How Ten Artists Composed Design Elements to Make Interesting Paintings." American Artist (November 1985): 530-531, repro.
Weiss, Ila. Poetic Landscape: The Art and Experience of Sanford R. Gifford. Newark, 1987: 246-247, pl. 20.
Wilmerding, John. American Views: Essays on American Art. Princeton, 1991: 5, color pl. 1, fig. 2.
Wilmerding, John. The Artist's Mount Desert: American Painters on the Maine Coast. Princeton, 1994: 131-133, fig. 132, frontispiece.
Avery, Kevin J. The Panorama and Its Manifestation in American Landscape Painting, 1795-1870. Ph.D dissertation, Columbia University, New York, 1995: 361-363, fig. 171.
Harvey, Eleanor Lewis Jones. "That Earlier, Wilder Image": Oil Sketches by American Landscape Painters, 1830-1880." Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, New Haven, 1998: 70-71, fig. 17.
Katlan, Alexander. "The American Artist's Tools and Materials for On-Site Oil Sketching." Journal of the American Institute for Conservation 38, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 22.
Belanger, Pamela J. Maine in America: American Art at The Farnsworth Art Museum. Rockland, Maine, 2000: 60.
Skrapits, Joseph C. "Sacred Scenery." American Artist 64, no. 692 (March 2000): 26, 78, repro.