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house where dinner was prepared and at six we left for home. Church and Church were present and wanted me to go home with them to pass the night, but I felt I ought to go home. Dr. Bellows went with them. As I came home in the twilight I looked at the beautiful mountains where we had been so much together and which glorify so many of his canvasses and felt how henceforth they would be sacred ground to me in memory of him and dear Gertrude

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SANFORD R. GIFFORD.

Mr. Sanford R. Gifford, the landscape painter, died of pneumonia, following an attack of malarial fever, yesterday morning in this city at his rooms in the Dime Savings Bank Building, Broadway and Thirty-second street, at about half-past three o'clock, and before night his body was on the way to the home of his boyhood at Hudson in this state, the summer residence of his brother painters, Church and McEntee. He was one of the most widely known, respected and successful of American artists, and by a very large circle of friends, inclusive of many artists, was greatly beloved. His age was fifty-seven years. Since 1854 he had been a member of the National Academy, and for many years his name has been on the rolls of members of the Century and Union League Clubs. His studio was at the southwest corner of the third floor of the Tenth street building. Jervis McEntee's is immediately below it, R.W. Hubbard's adjoins it, and near by are Homer Martin's, Casilear's, Shattuck's, T. W. Wood's Guy's. M. F. H. De Haas's, J.G. Brown's, Whittredge's, W. H. Beard's, G. H. Hall's and E. L. Henry's. His pictures adorn many private and public collections in New York and throughout the United States. During the late war he served his country as a soldier in the Seventh regiment, and several of his most interesting works, recently exhibited at the fair of that regiment on the occasion of the opening of its new armory, were delineations of war-scenes in which he had been a participant. The Catskills, the White Mountains, the Adirondacks and the Rocky Mountains were among his favorite places of resort, and he had visited the Nile, the Rhine and the Rhone, the Alps and the Apennines, the Mediterranean, the Adriatic and the Egean. At Rome, twenty years ago, he was one of a large, interesting and decidedly active company of American artists, William Page, Whittredge, Randolph Rogers, G. L. Brown, W.H. Beard, Albert Bierstadt, Buchanan Read, Rothermel (of Philadelphia), and Cephas Giovanni Thompson being conspicuous lights. His birthplace was Greenfield, a small post village of Saratoga county in this state, the population of which to day is scarcely three thousand. 

Not long ago Mr. Gifford described to the present writer his method of composing and painting a picture. Landscape painting he said was air-painting; and the object of the landscape painter was to reproduce the impression made upon him by, beautiful natural scenery——and he emphasized the word "beautiful." When he saw anything that vividly impressed him, his habit was to make at once a smalllpencil sketch of it on a piece of paper not larger than an ordinary visiting card. On returning to New York after a summer trip, his pockets contained many such souvenirs, which subsequently were re-sketched in oil, on a larger scale, the canvas being, say, twelve inches by eight, and the time consumed not more than two hours. When one of the oil-studies was finished he was about ready to paint a picture from it. The preliminary experimenting——the processes of selection and rejection——had been accomplished; he waited only for a favorable day on which to begin——a day when he was in his best condition physically, and when he felt just like undertaking the task. When that day came he entered his studio soon after sunrise, locked the door, and worked until just before sunset, resting only a few minutes at noon for a frugal luncheon of bread and coffee. If any visitor called, there was no answer to his knocking. Neither friends nor potentates could gain admission to Gifford's studio on that first great day when for ten. eleven or twelve consecutive hours he was getting his picture on canvas. His inspiration was at fever heat; he did not criticize his work, he simply did it, as the afflatus moved him. No first day was long enough for the ardent painter, and very often at the end of it so much has been accomplished that even an artist friend stepping into his studio the next morning would often express his surprise that Gifford intended to touch the painting again. The rapidity and momentum had been Michael Angelesque. 

On that initial day Gifford had begun, he said, by staining the disagreeable, glaring white of his canvas with a solution of turpentine and burnt Sienna. Next, with a piece of white chalk he had drawn an outline of the proposed picture. Next, he had "set" his pallet, squeezing from the tubes white, cadmium, vermilion, madder lake, raw Sienna, burnt Sienna, Caledonia brown and permanent blue, one after the other, along the upper rim, and putting just below them another row consisting of three or four tints of mixed white cadmium, three or four tints of orange, and three or four tints of green, while along the lower edge were arranged several tints of blue. Since the color of the sky was to be the key-note of his picture, the first thing that he painted was the horizon——the color of the sky at the horizon, this color being the key-note of the color of the air. The business of criticism, correction and completion belonged to other days than the first day, and Gifford always liked to keep his picture in his studio as long as possible——the Horatian seven years would not have been too long for him. Pointing to a canvas on the easel he exclaimed: "I thought the picture was done half a dozen times. Certainly it might have been called finished six months ago. I was working at it all day yesterday." The last act in the regular process was the varnishing of the painting with boiled oil so many times that a veil was left between the canvas and the spectator's eye, the farther away any object the denser being the veil. This veil served the purpose of reflecting and refracting the light, the surface of the canvas ceasing to be opaque, and becoming transparent, so that the eye looked through it upon and into the scene beyond. The really important matter, observed Mr. Gifford, is not the natural object itself, but the veil or medium through which we see it.

"The best thing by Corot that I ever saw," he added, "was a lithograph after one of his pictures," and that ws the same as saying that with a certain subdued style of modern painting to which the harmonious arrangement of positive colors is a problem no longer necessary of solution, he had little sympathy. Gifford's master was Thomes Cole; the traditions which he respected were those which brought fame and wealth to Church and Kensett; and the beauty the impression of which he most liked to reproduce was the glory of the sky as it suffused the autumn gold. He was the painter of the Indian summer; and if his subject was European it was the beauty of Greek day as it enveloped the Parthenon, or of an Italian sunset as it caressed the domes and towers of Venice and the sails on the Grand Canal. But when, on one occasion he heard that somebody had said that he could not paint anything but warmth, the charge so nettled him that he immediately prepared to astonish some of his admirers by producing the impressive expositions entitled "Kauterskill Cove, Twilight," a work now owned in Portland, Maine. Successful, however, as were the mystery and gathering darkness depicted there, Gifford did not pursue the new course long. The demands of his clients were too noisy to be silenced easily, and his very last pictures were the "Matterhorn" and the "Parthenon" in full, blazing sunlight. 

A landscapist of unusual elegance he was, and, in this respect he resembled Diaz. These Indian Summer Landscapes of his, like the Forests of Fontainebleau of Diaz——the artist did not see them grand, but felt them delicious. Gifford's designs, however were more elaborately expressed than Diaz's, and sometimes they lost in consequence that apprehension of amplitude of masses. which the French painter never failed to appreciate, and the use and place of which French Landscape painting understands to the full extent. The purple reds and the hearty blues which Diaz revelled in give way, in Gifford's pictures to gold and golden yellows; but a strong sensuous delight in a natural beauty is seen in each and in this respect, it may be added, the two Giffords——Sanford and Swain——have long been antagonistic. Sanford Gifford's best works are characterized by simplicity, nobleness and repose——that is to say, they are greek in spirit. What he loved in the Old Masters was these attributes of their art; and his faith in the Old Masters was seen not in the reproduction of their subjects, but of the spirit which animated them. His themes were sometimes scenic, but his art was never scenic. 
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