Self Portrait, 1857

Provenance

Elihu Gifford, Hudson, New York

Sanford Gifford, MD, Cambridge, Massachusetts, by descent from above

Private collection, by descent from above

[With] Menconi & Schoelkopf, New York, New York

Exhibited

Michael Altman Fine Art & Advisory Services, New York, New York, An Artist’s Legacy and A Dealer’s Admiration: Paintings by Sanford Robinson Gifford from Important American Collections, October 12–December 14, 2012, no. 2

Literature

John F. Weir, A Memorial Catalogue of the Paintings of Sanford Robinson Gifford, N.A. (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1881), 18, no. 109 (as Portrait of Himself).

Ila Weiss, “Sanford Robinson Gifford” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1968), 160, plate VI A 2.

Ila Weiss, Poetic Landscape: The Art and Experience of Sanford R. Gifford (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1987), 82.

Kevin J. Avery and Donald J. Christensen, An Artist’s Legacy and A Dealer’s Admiration: Paintings by Sanford Robinson Gifford from Important American Collections (New York: Michael Altman Fine Art & Advisory Services, 2012), 16–17, 109, no. 2.

Note

In the fall of 1857, Gifford established a workspace at the Studio Building on West Tenth Street in New York, where he would work alongside painters such as Worthington Whittredge (1820–1910), William Hart (1823–1894), and Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902), among others. This portrait may have been the first painting he completed there.