ON VIEW

The atmospheric landscapes of Sanford Robinson Gifford exemplify the luminist phenomenon in mid-nineteenth-century American art. Born to a cultivated family in upstate New York, Gifford grew up on the Hudson River near the Catskill Mountains. Through his brother Charles, he developed an appreciation of the fine arts that culminated in the desire to become a professional painter. In 1845, after spending several semesters at Brown University, Gifford went to New York City to achieve his goal.

At first, Gifford pursued figure painting. He turned to landscape, however, after studying the work of Thomas Cole (q.v.) and making a trip to the Catskills in 1846. Following his election as a full member of the National Academy of Design in 1854, Gifford traveled to Europe, visiting England and the Continent before returning to take a studio in the newly opened Tenth Street Studio Building. With the outbreak of the Civil War, Gifford set aside his painting to serve in the Union army. Later he traveled again to Europe and also to the Middle East, and in 1870 he made the first of two trips to the Far West. Although his style changed little during the later part of his career, Gifford was widely esteemed at the time of his death in 1880.

Torre dei Schiavi, Roman Campagna depicts the ruins of the so-called Torre dei Schiavi (Tower of the Slaves) located in the countryside near the city of Rome. In Gifford's painting, the cylindrical tower appears small and almost incidental, pushed to the left side of the composition to allow the viewer an unbroken prospect of fields and distant snow capped peaks. To the right, a tiny figure adds a note of human interest and establishes the scale of the scene. Gifford's use of an extended horizontal format and a low horizon magnifies the breadth of the sky, giving wide scope to the role of atmospheric effects.

Writing in 1867, Henry T. Tuckerman noted that Gifford's landscapes were often "destitute of exceptional picturesqueness."(1) This observation is certainly true of the Torre dei Schiavi, for while the ruined tower is an inherently intriguing subject, its prominence within the composition has been deliberately downplayed. By lessening the pictorial and associative qualities of his landscapes, Gifford effectively calls attention to the subtleties of light, air, and space. Although largely intangible, these elements form the true subject of Gifford's canvas and place him squarely within the luminist fold.

Luminism itself had no spokesperson, nor did it spring up among any one group of artists. Rather, it was a broad-based phenomenon that emerged in both America and northern Europe during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Reaching its zenith in the United States during the 1850s and 1860s, Luminism was in part a response to the grandiose Romanticism of such landscapists as Cole and Frederic Edwin Church (q.v.). In contrast to the awe-inspiring spectacles depicted by those artists, Luminist paintings are typically smaller in scale and involve reductive compositions featuring tranquil expanses of sky and water. Poetic suggestion replaces turbulent drama and overt didacticism, and for the first time in American landscape painting, mood begins to assume the same level of importance as subject matter. In Gifford's Torre dei Schiavi, the aura of introspective calm evoked by the artist's Luminist approach goes hand in hand with his image of a distant ruin, ideally complementing the vanished glory of what was once an emperor's villa.

Situated east of Rome on the ancient Via Praenestina, the Torre dei Schiavi belongs to a complex of buildings constructed by the third-century emperors Gordian père and his son, Gordian III. Originally a mausoleum, the circular structure has no recorded connection with slaves or slavery. At least one commentator has suggested that its colorful appellation was derived from the name of a prominent family by the name of dello Schiavo. It is unclear, however, what relationship, if any, existed between the Gordianic ruins and the fifteenth-century Roman family.

During the mid-nineteenth century, the Torre dei Schiavi gained popularity as the site of an annual comic festival organized by the city's resident German painters. Other foreign artists gravitated toward the ruin as well, and from the 1830s onward the Torre dei Schiavi was depicted by many American landscapists. Among those who chose it as the subject of their work were John Gadsby Chapman (1808-1889), Thomas Cole, Jasper Francis Cropsey (q.v.), William Stanley Haseltine (1835-1900), John Frederick Kensett (1816-1872), and Elihu Vedder (q.v.). Gifford, who visited Italy in 1856-57, may have begun his small painting onsite (he is known to have sketched with Albert Bierstadt [q.v.] at the Torre dei Schiavi in the spring of 1857), but probably completed the work in his studio at a later date.(2)

Torre dei Schiavi, Roman Campagna was bequeathed to the Currier Museum of Art in 2002 by Henry Melville Fuller.

VSD

NOTES

1. Henry T. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists (reprint; New York: James F. Carr, 1967), p. 524.
2. Although the canvas appears to have been painted using a wet-on-wet technique typical of plein-air painting, a pentimento of the shepherd figure in the foreground suggests that Gifford subsequently reworked the composition in his studio. See also Kevin J. Avery in Avery and Franklin Kelly, eds., Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford, ex. cat. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003, pp. 140-42.

REFERENCES

Kevin J. Avery and Franklin Kelly, eds. Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford. Ex. cat. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003.

Charles C. Eldredge. "Torre dei Schiavi: Monument and Metaphor." Smithsonian Studies in American Art 1, no. 3 (Fall 1987): 15-33.

Sanford Robinson Gifford [1823-1880] . Ex. cat. University of Texas Art Museum, 1970.

Henry T. Tuckerman. Book of the Artists. New York: James F. Carr, 1967.