Robert Swain Gifford
Robert Swain Gifford
American, 1840 – 1905
Robert Swain Gifford was born on the small island of Nonamesset near Martha’ s Vineyard in Massachusetts in 1840. When he was two, his family moved to New Bedford where he would begin his education. To his advantage, he was able to learn French and how to play the violin from Mrs. William Swain, the family’ s proprietor. His liberal arts training continued when the Dutch marine painter Albert van Beest settled in nearby Fairhaven; he became his teacher when he was fourteen. Gifford first opened a studio in Boston in 1864 but after two years, he concluded that New York would be more suitable. The late 1860s marked the beginning of Gifford’ s many sketching trips out West and abroad. In 1869, he traveled to Oregon, California, and the Washington Territory, capturing a number of scenes, many of the majestic Columbia River, for William Cullen Bryant’ s book Picturesque America. A year later, he joined the gifted painter and designer Louis Comfort Tiffany on a trip abroad to London, Paris, Tangier, and to Cairo where they sailed down the Nile.
In 1873, Gifford married Frances Eliot, one of his students at the National Academy of Design, and together they traveled to Europe and North Africa. Gifford won a medal for his painting, Cairo, at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, and for other works at the Paris Exposition( 1889), the Buffalo Pan-American Exposition( 1901), and the Charleston Exposition( 1902). Continuing his journeys abroad, Gifford went to Scandinavia and northern Germany with Francis Davis Millet and Edwin Austin Abbey in 1882. Gifford also joined the 1899 Harriman Alaska Expedition. Led by the railroad magnate Edward H. Harriman, Gifford, fellow artists Frederick S. Dellenbaugh and Louis Agassiz Fuertes, and photographer Edward Curtis spent two months documenting the Alaskan coast. Gifford also helped found the New York Etching Club, and he was director of the Cooper Union from 1896 – 1905.
Napoleon Sarony( American, b. Canada, 1821 – 1896), Robert Swain Gifford, ca. 1870 – 1890, albumen print, 4 x 2 1/2 in., Museum of the City of New York, 41.366.18
REFERENCES: Ackerman, Gerald M. American Orientalists. Courbevoie / Paris:
ACR, 1994.“ American Painters— Robert Swain Gifford.” The Art Journal 3
( 1877): 310 – 312.
Dearinger, David Bernard. ed. Paintings and Sculpture in the Collection of the National Academy of Design. Volume 1, 1826- 1925. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 2004.
Gaw, Cooper.“ Robert Swain Gifford, Landscape-Painter. Brush and Pencil 15, no. 4( April 1905): 201 – 209, 211-218.
Montgomery, Walter, ed. American Art and American Art Collections: Essays on Artistic Subjects by the Best Art Writers, Fully Illustrated with Etchings, Photoetchings, Photogravures,
72 THE TILE CLUB: Camaraderie and American Plein-Air Painting