A View from the Berkshire Hills, near Pittsfield, Massachusetts
What words can be used to describe light?
Gifford, who once described landscape painting as “air painting,” here captured the hazy atmosphere of a sunny afternoon in autumn, presenting us with a low, hilly landscape rolling beneath a pale and misty sky. This painting was inspired by a sketching trip the artist took in September 1862, when he spent about three weeks traveling with the artists Launt Thompson and Worthington Whittredge along the Housatonic River in western Connecticut and Massachusetts.
\ Artist
Sanford Robinson Gifford
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.
\ About
Oil on canvas
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Will Richeson Jr.