Sanford Robinson Gifford

Sloans & Kenyon, Chevy Chase, Maryland, 14 November 2010, lot 1269

McClees Galleries, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania

Acquired from the above by the present owner

David Little and Carl Little, Art of Acadia, Lanham, Maryland, 2016, p. 56, illustrated

The artist completed the present work in the summer of 1864 while visiting Mount Desert Island, Maine with his sister Mary, and their good friends Jervis and Gertrude McEntee. Gifford filled his sketchbooks with drawings of the women in their cabin on this trip as well as studies of surrounding rocks and the sea. We are grateful to Dr. Ila Weiss for preparing the following:

"He captured the remarkable blue-green translucency of foreground water, effected with subtle variations of coolness, warmth and tone; a horizontal band of middle distant water, olive green overlapping cool greens toward the foreground; and distant water vanishing into dense air, khaki with cooler markings, incorporating the tan of the canvas where visible through thinner areas of paint. Foam and spray of foreground whitecaps are answered by glittering water dripping from dark rocks in the left middle distance and beneath the large central rock. The weighty, angular rocks and boulders are solidly constructed of dark and medium browns with gold flecks on the central rock, strongly contrasted to the dimly luminous, intangible fog beyond. Paint texture also contributes to spatial recession and atmospheric effect, with broad, relatively thick application on solid rock, through thicker and thinner variations in choppy water, to the more smoothly brushed foggy opalescence. The figure, clearly an afterthought, is thinly painted. In A Study from Nature at Mount Desert, Maine, Gifford asserted and celebrated nature’s “vaporous obscurity.”'