Sanford Robinson Gifford

(July 10, 1823 - August 29, 1880)

Sanford Robinson Gifford (July 10, 1823 - August 29, 1880) was an American landscape painter and one of the leading members of the Hudson River School. Gifford's landscapes are known for their emphasis on light and soft atmospheric effects, and he is regarded as a practitioner of Luminism, an offshoot style of the Hudson River School.

Gifford spent his childhood in Hudson, New York, the son of an iron foundry owner. He attended Brown University briefly before leaving to study art in New York City in the mid 1840s. By 1847 he was sufficiently skilled at painting to exhibit his first landscape at the National Academy of Design in New York and was elected an associate in 1851, an academician in 1854. Thereafter Gifford devoted himself to landscape painting, becoming one of the finest artists of the early Hudson River School.