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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 Text excerpted from A Capital Collection: Masterworks from the Corcoran Gallery of Art, which is available for purchase in the Corcoran Shop. :: Click here to purchase this catalog online
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