Name: Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823-1880)
Brand: Moonrise on the Seashore
Price: 32000.00 USD
Availability: SoldOut

Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823-1880)
Moonrise on the Seashore
signed with initials 'SRG' (lower right)
oil on canvas
8 x 18¹⁄₂ in. (20.3 x 47 cm.)
Painted circa 1867.

The artist.
Estate of the above.
Sale: Thomas E. Kirby & Co., New York, S.R. Gifford Collection, Part II, 1881, sold by the above.
Richard Butler, New York, acquired from the above.
Thomas Stanley Beckwith, Petersburg, Virginia.
Private collection, Petersburg, Virginia, by descent.
Deyan Popovic, New York.
Estate of the above.
Sotheby's, New York, 30 May 1985, lot 38B, sold by the above (as Coastal Sunset).
Alexander Gallery, New York.
Private collection.
Acquired by the present owner from the above.

A Memorial Catalogue of the Paintings of Sanford Robinson Gifford, N.A., New York, 1881, p. 40, no. 611 (as Moonrise on the Sea-shore, A Sketch).
I. Weiss, Poetic Landscape: The Art and Experience of Sanford R. Gifford, Cranbury, New Jersey, 1987, pp. 109-10, illustrated.

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Lot Essay

A letter from the recognized expert on the artist, Dr. Ila Weiss, accompanies this lot.

Dr. Weiss writes of the present work, "Only seven titles in the Memorial Catalogue (less than 1% of the total) were moonlights, all of necessity memories of an observation. Unlike the sunrises, Moonrise on the Seashore captures an introspective mood, its vast, serene solitude conveyed by three horizontal bands in near-monochrome: cool gray in the moonlit sky, warmer gray where reflected on the wet beach (lighter towards the center), and dark grays and browns suggesting the rippling and folding surface of the water—the three punctuated by the vertical accent, just left of center, of the effulgent moon and its reflections on sea and wet foreground (the bar of yellow-white light broken by the dark brown of the shadow of a breaker and crossed by a linear edge of the flowing water)." (unpublished letter, March 2019)

The original owner of the present work, Mr. Richard Butler, was a dedicated patron of the artist as well as a founding member of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.