Sanford Robinson Gifford (American,1823-1880) Sunset over New York Bay, 1878
Oil on canvas, 23 ¾ x 40 ¾ in.
Museum purchase, 72.26

Sanford Gifford grew up in Hudson, New York, along the river where he and his New York painting colleagues found the picturesque vistas that earned them the name Hudson River school. His boyhood experiences also included first-hand knowledge of the burgeoning age of industry (his father was co-owner of an iron foundry). Gifford's scenic interpretations, favored by art buyers in the 1800s, merely whisper about the presence of the machine.

Gifford, known for working at "fever heat," channeled his energy into this neatly organized image of the New York Bay. Gifford filled two-thirds of the canvas with sky. His clouds fan out in tidy tiers to frame the sunset that radiates from the center. The rosy glow warms both the sky and the smooth, mirror-like surface of the water. In the midst of this theater of nature, ships and boats, dwarfed by the sky and the sea, proceed in an orderly arrangement that suggests a serene, carefully measured world.

Depictions of this area by other artists would show the New York waterfront dominated by machines, tall buildings, industry, smoke and speed. In Gifford's painting, a different view of the city and its industry is depicted. The tiny silhouette of the city rises just along the horizon. Small, thin plumes of smoke, one from a paddle wheel steamboat, curl upward. In Sunset over New York Bay, human endeavor is no match for the splendor of nature.