America and the Grand Tour: Sanford Robinson Gifford at Home and Abroad

This exhibition compared Hudson River School artist Sanford Gifford's American landscapes with those produced after two trips abroad (1855-1857, 1868-1869), examining each group in the context of cultural trends at the time: the influence of transcendentalist philosophy seen in his American works and the lure of the picturesque and the exotic as depicted in his foreign works. The exhibition also explored how Gifford's deep transcendentalist beliefs shaped his experience of both the American and foreign landscapes and examined the inherent conflict between the character of the Grand Tour at the time and the transcendentalist appreciation of nature.

Organized by Monica Anke Koenig, a senior at Vassar majoring in American culture, the exhibition included eight Gifford paintings owned by the college, two works loaned by the Young Morse Historic Site, drawings from Gifford's American sketchbooks, American and European landscapes by Gifford's contemporaries from the Vassar collection of Hudson River School paintings, as well as maps and illustrations from popular travel books from the years of his foreign tours. An illustrated catalogue written by Koenig accompanied the exhibition. The exhibition was funded in part by the Friends of the Vassar College Art Gallery and the American Culture Program Lockwood Fund. There are works that appeared in this exhibition that were loans to the Loeb and therefore do not appear on this website.