The Riverside, 1854

Provenance

Private collection, William H. Ames
Sale, Christie’s, New York, American Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture, September 27, 1996, lot 20
Barridoff Galleries, Portland, Maine
Private collection, acquired from the above, 1996
Sale, Bonhams Skinner, Marlborough, Massachusetts, September 26, 2025, lot 13

Exhibited

National Academy of Design, New York, New York, 1860 Artists’ Fund Society, December 22, 1860

Literature

Ila Weiss Opinion Letter, March 22, 1988

Kevin Avery and Franklin Kelley, Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford (The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2003), 248.

Related Works

Summer Afternoon, 1855, oil on canvas, framed: 40½ x 53 x 4½ inches, signed lower center: SR Gifford 1855; Newark Museum of Art, Newark, New Jersey

Untitled (Lake Scene), c. 1854-55, oil on paper mounted on paper board, 9½ x 14⅝ inches, signed lower left: S.R. Gifford; Figge Art Museum, City of Davenport Art Collection, Davenport, Iowa

Note

According to Gifford scholar Dr. Ila Weiss, the present work is a study for the artist’s The River Bank which was exhibited at the 1854 National Academy of Design exhibition as one of a pair. Weiss notes that The Riverside is representative of Gifford’s paintings from the early 1850s “in its separation of the foreground and distance by means of color: warm brownish hues and strong highlights and shadows in the shadows in the foreground; cool, grayed blues and greens unifying the aerial distance.” The romantic mood that the painting conveys was also stated, “conveyed by a couple lounging on the foreground bank” and it’s composition forming “a sense of closure and comfort induced by the oval format and reinforced by the framing, drooping tree—a Gifford hallmark.”[1]

[1]Ila Weiss Opinion Letter, March 22, 1988.