We're in a storage facility looking at some works in the collection of the Art Bridges Foundation and we're standing in front of a lovely small painting by the 19th century landscape painter Sanford Gifford Twilight in the Adirondacks from 1862.
When you approach this work, it is seemingly small, but the moment that you allow your eye to rest in every detail and to travel through the world, the sense of vastness immediately becomes overwhelming, and it's almost like you have to pivot out of it in order to remind yourself that you are standing in front of a painting.
When I walked into this room, I was drawn to the oranges and blues and purples and yellows.
And we see these tiny figures.
This landscape draws us in to look at it closely.
We have this blazing orange above the mountain range, these small little wisps of gold touching the bottom of the clouds, and as our eyes drift upwards, the sky begins to lighten and we can begin to see these light blues and the sense of the sun sinking below the horizon.
It's funny that you mention the yellow underneath the clouds, because those little brushstrokes might be my favorite passages.
And so, in a way, I have the idea of a memory of a place, the feeling of a place, instead of an exact topographical view.
There is something very poetic here, and I think that's what Gifford was going for.
The work is often described as evocative rather than descriptive, and I think that his use of color very much exemplifies that.
Gifford received very little formal education.
Unlike his friend and colleague Frederick Edmund Church, he did not study directly with Thomas Cole.
And unlike another one of his friends, Albert Bierstadt, he did not study in a European academy, but he traveled and he sketched endlessly.
And when he did have the chance to travel to Europe, Gifford encountered the work of the French Barbizon school, the work of John Constable and, most importantly, the painting of Turner.
It does have a feeling of longing, and I think that's especially true when we look at the group of figures, two of whom are pulling a canoe up along the shore, another figure in this makeshift tent, some trees that have been felled to provide firewood, I presume.
The figures are really small.
The rocks beside them are enormous.
The overall effect is one of a suffused and soft and serene atmosphere.
That is incredibly comforting because it is somehow captured in a fleeting moment.
Art historians have interpreted many of the twilight scenes produced by artists in a decade or two before the Civil War as being about the tensions arising from the feeling that the confrontation over slavery was imminent.
1862 was the year of the Battle of Shiloh which, at the time, had been the costliest battle in terms of human life.
And even though Gifford saw very little active combat serving in the National Guard, it is impossible not to consider what this loss of human life would have done to any American living from the.
We also know that on a personal level, Gifford lost two brothers that he was very close to one directly, as a result of the war itself.
And so the war had to be very present on Gifford's mind and indeed on everyone's mind.
Twilight is oftentimes thought in terms of the sunset, and this is certainly the feeling that is being created by this painting.
But Twilight is also a moment of potentially a dawn and I believe that this painting, at the same time that it might be mourning the loss of this kind of scene and this kind of brotherly peace.
The suffused tree line is not one rendered in a dreadful or dangerous way.
It's almost as if Gifford is inviting us to take that gentle plunge into that seemingly dark horizon and then off into the mountains as well.
The painting is a refuge, perhaps in a way.
