| The Ruins of the Parthenon was Sanford Gifford’s last important painting,
and he considered it the crowning achievement of his career. Based on sketches
he made on a visit to the Acropolis in May 1869, the painting, according to Gifford,
was “not a picture of a building, but a picture of a day.” Much the
same might be said of the majority of his works, for he was unsurpassed in his
ability to capture the subtleties and nuances of an astounding range of light
and atmosphere. Gifford’s mature works—and this is a prime example—are
less about the specific physical facts of the scenes they portray (although those
are not unimportant), and more about the very act of perception and vision. As
one of his friends observed, “Gifford’s art was poetic and reminiscent.
. . . [I]t was nature passed through an alembic [a device that refines or transmutes
through distillation] of a finely organized sensibility...”
- Franklin Kelly, Curator of American and British Paintings
National Gallery of Art, Washington |
Text excerpted from A Capital Collection: Masterworks from
the Corcoran Gallery of Art.
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