The Wilderness

Expand

IIIFView PDF

The Wilderness

Artist Sanford Robinson Gifford (American, 1823-1880)

Date1860

DimensionsFrame: 43 × 67 × 5 3/4 in. (109.2 × 170.2 × 14.6 cm)

Mediumoil on canvas

ClassificationPaintings

Credit LinePurchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott

Object number

1951.403

On View

Toledo Museum of Art (2445 Monroe Street), Gallery, 23A, New Media

Collections

Paintings

Published ReferencesMetropolitan Museum of Art, A Memorial Catalogue of the Paintings of Sanford Gifford, New York, 1881, no. 204 (as In the Wilderness).

Cowdrey, M.B., National Academy of Design Exhibition Record, 1826-1860, New York, 1943, I, p. 183, no. 561.

Richardson, E., Painting in America, New York, 1956, p. 227, fig. 103.

Bermingham, P., American Art in the Barbizon Mood (exh. cat.)

Weiss, I., Sanford Gifford (1823-1880), New York, 1977, pp. 195-205, pl. VI H.1. (reprint, Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1968)

Sweeny, J., "The Artist-Explorers of the America West: 1860-1880," unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1975, pp. 16, 18, illus. 10.

The Toledo Museum of Art, The Toledo Museum of Art, American Paintings, Toledo, 1979, pp. 54-55, pl. 54, color pl. III.

Weiss, Ila, Poetic Landscape: the art and experience of Sanford R. Gifford, Newark, N.J., 1987, pp. 16-17, 88, 89, 218, 220-221, 223, 254, repr. p. 18.

Rodriquez Roque, Oswaldo, "The exhaltation of American landscape painting," in Nature rightly observed: Hudson River School landscape paintings from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Shizuoka, Japan, 1988, p. 53, fig. 33, p. 34. [not in exhibition]

Bordo, Jonathan, "Jack Pine-Wilderness sublime or the erasure of the aboriginal presence from the landscape," Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 27, no. 4, p. 105, 122, fig. 5, p. 106, Winter 1992-1993.

Miller, Angela, The empire of the eye, Ithaca, 1993, p. 282, fig. 64.

Oraezie Vallino, Fabienne-Charlotte, "Alle radici dell'etica ambientale: pensiero sulla natura, wilderness e creativita artistica negli Stati Uniti del XIX secolo," parte seconda, Storia dell'Arte, no. 79, 1993, p. 361, 362, fig. 28, p. 363.

Greenhalgh, Adam, " Darkness visible: A twilight in the Catskills by Sanford Robinson Gifford," American Art Journal, vol. 32, nos. 1-2, 2001, p. 58, repr. fig. 13.

Meslay, Olivier, "De la terre promise à la poussière," in Salomé, Laurent, La mythologié de l'quest dans l'art Americain 1830-1940, Milan, Silvana 2007, p. 54, fig. 4 (col.).

Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo Museum of Art Masterworks, Toledo, 2009, p. 243, repr. (col.).

Salaz, Ken, Landscapes in Oil: A Contemporary Guide to Realistic Painting in the Classical Tradition, New York, New York, The Monacelli Press, 2019, p. 70, repr. (col.) p. 67.

Exhibition HistoryNew York, NAD, 1860, no. 561, (as The Wilderness).

Detroit, Detroit Intitute of Arts, Painting in America, 1957, no. 111.

New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, The American Frontier: Images and Myths, 1973, no. 30, fig. 4.

Toledo, The Toledo Museum of Art, Heritage and Horizon: American Painting 1776-1976, 1976, no. 11, repr.

New York, IBM Gallery of Science and Art, American Paintings from teh Toledo Museum of Art, 1986.

New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, American Paradise, 1987, pp. 218-220, repr. (col.).

Minneapolis, Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Saint Louis, Saint Louis Art Museum; Toledo, The Toledo Museum of Art; Kansas City, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art; et al. Made in America: ten centuries of American art, 1995-1996, p. 56, repr. (col.).

London, Tate Britain; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States 1820-1880, 2002, no. 32, pp. 27, 50, 146, 268, no. 79 and 80, repr. (col.).

New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Fort Worth, Amon Carter Museum; Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art, Hudson River School Visions: the Lanscapes of Sanford R. Gifford, 2003-2004, no. 12, pp. 12-13, 14, 32, 37, 114-117, 120, 124, 167, 174, 203, 233, 234, repr. (col.). p. 115.

Toledo Museum of Art, Luminous Visions: Phillip K. Smith III and Light Across the Collection, October 17, 2020-April 4, 2021.

Label TextA masterpiece of what has been called “luminism”—precisely rendered, poetic depictions of landscapes that focus on realistic effects of light and atmosphere—Sanford Gifford’s The Wilderness evokes a romanticized vision of humans living harmoniously with nature. In a vast American landscape dominated by a rugged peak (perhaps modeled on Mount Katahdin in Maine), Gifford includes a Native American family on the near shore and a canoe in the lake, based on sketches he made of the Mi’kmaq peoples in Halifax Basin, Nova Scotia. While in reality such vistas were being encroached upon by industrialization and urbanization, The Wilderness is an homage to what had become central to American identity: the space, beauty, and unspoiled land that spoke of national destiny, spiritual renewal, and endless possibilities. American Indians—though having been forcibly removed from their ancestral lands in the Eastern United States by this time—became part of a nostalgic ideal of a simpler era being lost to “progress.”