"Chief Pictures"
Gifford referred to the best of his landscapes as his "chief pictures". Many of his chief pictures are characterized by a hazy atmosphere with soft, suffuse sunlight. Gifford often painted a large body of water in the foreground or middle distance, in which the distant landscape would be gently reflected. Examples of Gifford's "chief pictures" in museum collections today include:
- Lake Nemi (1856–57), Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio
- The Wilderness (1861), Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio
- A Passing Storm (1866), Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut
- Ruins of the Parthenon (1880), Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Read more about this topic: Sanford Robinson Gifford
Famous quotes containing the words chief and/or pictures:
“Life is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy. Its chief good is for well-mixed people who can enjoy what they find, without question.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
“Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)