Robert Swain Gifford

Robert Swain Gifford ( born December 23, 1840 in Naushon, Massachusetts, † January 13, 1905 in New York ) was an American landscape painter.

Life

Gifford was born on a small island called Nonamasset, which is the island Naushon on the southeast coast of Massachusetts. When he was two years old, the family moved to Fairhaven (Mass. ), where his father worked as boatmen and fishermen.

Gifford received his first lessons in the art of living there a Dutch marine painter, Albert van Beest. In 1864 he founded his own studio in Boston, but moved in 1866 to New York. From there he undertook in 1869 on study trips to Oregon and California, and from 1870 on by the Western European countries, Morocco, Algeria and Egypt, until he returned home in 1875 through England again. He was an American landscape painter Franics Elliot (* 1844), the daughter of Congressman Thomas Dawes Eliot from New Bedford ( Mass.), married.

Gifford was influenced by the Barbizon School and is among the American landscape painters of his time one of the most talented and versatile; his landscapes are true to nature and very characteristic in the details; with equal virtuosity, he treated snowstorms in the high mountains and peaceful, idyllic games. He has mostly chosen from Italy, Egypt, Algeria and Morocco, His motives, which he also sent handled the oil painting like the watercolor technique.

Some of his works hang in major exhibitions in the USA, such as the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC