Sanford Robinson Gifford grew up across the river from the Catskill home of the influential landscape painter Thomas Cole, and he learned to paint in the tradition of the Hudson River School. Gifford traveled widely throughout the American west, the East Coast, Europe, and the Middle East in search of landscape subjects. His subtle, light-suffused landscapes led him to be associated with a style of Hudson River School landscape painting termed “luminism” by 20th-century critics.