THREE IMPORTANT GIFFORD PAINTINGS
EXCLUSIVE TO EXHIBITION AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART

The National Gallery of Art is the only venue in which three important Gifford paintings can be seen as part of the traveling exhibition Hudson River School Visions: The Landscape of Sanford R. Gifford, previously on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth. The exhibition will be on view in the Gallery's West Building June 27 through September 26, 2004. Works exclusive to the exhibition in Washington, D.C., include a dramatic pair of oval-shaped canvases entitled Morning in the Adirondacks and Sunset in the Shawangunk Mountains (both 1854), from the Westervelt-Warner Museum of American Art, on loan from the Warner Collection of Gulf States Paper Corporation, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and View from South Mountain in the Catskills (1873), on loan from St. Johnsbury Athenaeum, St. Johnsbury, Vermont.

In 1854, at the National Academy of Design in New York, Gifford debuted the most important pictures he had yet painted--a pair of large-scale oval works entitled Morning in the Adirondacks and Sunset in the Shawangunk Mountains. These works, with their opposition of dawn and dusk and depiction of familiar American scenery, are striking examples of paired, or pendant, paintings.

Many landscape painters working in America in the 1850s created paired landscapes, both real and imaginary. Over the course of his career, American painter Thomas Cole (1801-1848) created several pendants, the most familiar being The Departure and The Return (1837) and Past and Present (1838). The National Academy audience of 1854 would have recognized Gifford's homage to Cole in Morning in the Adirondacks and Sunset in the Shawangunk Mountains, both to Cole's use of paired pictures to establish narrative possibilities, and to his fondness for the mountain scenery of the Hudson River Valley. Although judged "slightly monotonous in color" by one critic, Gifford's pendants must have been well received by his fellow artists, for he was elected a full member of the National Academy that year.

View from South Mountain in the Catskills (1873) appears to reprise a now lost major work that the artist exhibited at the National Academy in 1864. In the Civil War years, Gifford painted the major sites in the vicinity of the Catskill Mountain House, among them the view from South Mountain. Gifford created numerous drawings and oil sketches of the vista before and after 1864; the painting from the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum was exhibited at the Brooklyn Art Association in 1873.

The Westervelt-Warner Museum of American Art contains the significant Warner Collection of the Gulf States Paper Corporation. It showcases 18th-, 19th-, and 20th- century American paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts collected by Jack Warner, who served as chairman and CEO of the Tuscaloosa-based paper company for more than 40 years. The collection includes moer than 500 works by leading artists such as Paul Revere, Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, Alfred Jacob Miller, William Sydney Mount, Duncan Phyfe, Hiram Powers, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, Winslow Homer, James McNeill Whistler, George Luks, Robert Henri, Andrew Wyeth, and Edward Hopper, among many others. For information e-mail info@warnermuseum.org, or visit www.warnermuseum.org.

St. Johnsbury Athenaeum is a private, nonprofit public library and art gallery located in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. The art gallery, added to the library in 1873, is now the oldest art gallery still in its original form in the United States. The major part of the gallery's collection is devoted to American and European artists from the late 18th- to the mid-19th century, with strong representation by artists of the Hudson River School such as Asher B. Durand, Jasper Cropsey, Gifford, James and William Hart, Samuel Colman, and Worthington Whittredge. Dominating the gallery from its inception has been the magnificent canvas of the Domes of the Yosemite by Albert Bierstadt (1867). For more information, visit www.stjathenaeum.org.

General Information

The National Gallery of Art and its Sculpture Garden are at all times free to the public. They are located on the National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW, and are open Monday through Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Sunday from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. The Gallery is closed on December 25 and January 1. For information call (202) 737-4215 or the Telecommunications Device for the Deaf (TDD) at (202) 842-6176, or visit the Gallery's Web site at www.nga.gov.

Visitors will be asked to present all carried items for inspection upon entering the East and West Buildings. Checkrooms are free of charge and located at each entrance. Luggage and other oversized bags must be presented at the 4th Street entrances to the East or West Building to permit x-ray screening and must be deposited in the checkrooms at those entrances. For the safety of visitors and the works of art, nothing may be carried into the Gallery on a visitor's back. Any bag or other items that cannot be carried reasonably and safely in some other manner must be left in the checkrooms. Items larger than 17 x 26 inches cannot be accepted by the Gallery or its checkrooms.

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THREE IMPORTANT GIFFORD PAINTINGS EXCLUSIVE TO EXHIBITION AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART

THREE IMPORTANT GIFFORD PAINTINGS
EXCLUSIVE TO EXHIBITION AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART