Drawings and Sketchbooks

Sanford Robinson Gifford’s drawings reveal a landscape painter making choices. A contour can establish a mountain, a few shaded passages distinguish near rock from distant water, and words can preserve information that graphite alone cannot supply. Small studies show him testing what to include before committing to a larger painted arrangement.

Four leaves from his 1859 sketchbook at the Cleveland Museum of Art provide a particularly useful introduction. They include a coastal view, several small compositions, a seascape with color notations and a page carrying his name and address. Together they present different uses of a working book, rather than four examples of the same kind of drawing. ^{[1] [2] [3] [4]}

Drawing as a foundation

The Archives of American Art finding aid places formal drawing instruction early in Gifford’s career. After moving to New York in 1845, he studied with the drawing master John R. Smith and took classes involving the human figure. Drawing, perspective and anatomy formed part of his preparation before landscape became his principal field. ^[5]

That background helps place the sketchbooks within a sustained artistic practice. The portable pages do not simply record a traveler noticing attractive scenery. They show someone with experience of organizing form, considering proportion and translating what he sees into marks on a surface.

The later landscape studies give those skills a flexible use. A precise contour, a quickly shaded foreground or a group of small compositional frames can each answer a different immediate question. Their variety reflects purposeful choices about what a particular drawing needs to preserve.

A portable record of travel

The Cleveland museum places the sketchbook within Gifford’s 1859 journey through New Hampshire and Maine. Its shared account names the White Mountains, Dixville Notch and Peaks Island in Casco Bay among the subjects he encountered. The surviving pages connect travel with the work of observing and recording. ^[1]

A bound book offers several advantages for that activity. It keeps successive observations together and allows a person to move between a fuller view, a small detail and a written reminder. A page need not become a self-contained exhibition drawing to preserve something useful.

The illustrated leaves show this range materially. Some contain a broad landscape across much of the available width; another combines several little framed designs. Blank areas, marginal marks and a name page belong to the same working object. Their differences make the book more informative than a sequence of uniformly finished images would be.

Peak’s Island: shore, pier and distant headland

The museum titles page 20 with a place and date inscription identifying Peak’s Island, Maine, and September 7,1859. Trees and rocks occupy the left foreground, a pier extends over the water and a rocky headland appears at the right. Small boats punctuate the broader coastal space. ^[1]

The drawing uses several degrees of description. Tree trunks and nearby rock edges are comparatively distinct; foliage is suggested through looser groups of marks. The water remains much more open, allowing a few vessel shapes and distant contours to carry considerable spatial information.

The pier is especially effective because its supports establish a measured passage away from the shore. Its straight structure contrasts with the irregular trees and rocks, giving the scene a human-made element without overwhelming the coast around it.

The page shows how a working drawing can preserve relationships as well as objects. Near and far, growth and construction, open water and articulated shore are already organized. The study has a specific place identity, but it does not need an established link to one finished painting to be valuable evidence of Gifford’s attention.

Several compositions on one page

Page 40,catalogued as Maine Landscape , contains several small views bounded by drawn frames. One has a strongly rising mountain, another gives more space to sky, and a rounded vignette explores another relation between land and water. A further rectangular prospect sits beneath the upper group. ^[3]

The frames make the act of selection unusually clear. Gifford is not simply drawing a mountain and letting the rest of the page remain available indefinitely. He gives each small composition boundaries, testing how much of a scene can be held within a particular shape.

Differences of proportion become visible at a glance. A high mountain needs a different allocation of space from a lower horizon with more sky. The rounded design creates another way to concentrate attention. The page treats format as part of the problem of landscape representation.

The museum’s title does not establish that every little view records the same site or moment. The evidence supports a page of varied compositional thought. More precise connections would require additional identifications, rather than an assumption that adjacency makes the images interchangeable.

Preserving color in graphite

Page 04 is catalogued as Sea Scape with Color Notations . It combines a faint coastal arrangement with written notes toward the right. Rocks and a small boat occupy the nearer space, while light horizontal marks suggest water and sky. ^[2]

The sheet demonstrates that a monochrome study can carry information about color. Lines and shading preserve forms and relative lightness, while words supplement what the material cannot directly reproduce. The page can work as both a visual arrangement and a reminder of an observed effect.

The notes should not be expanded into an invented paint recipe. Some handwriting and abbreviations remain difficult to read, and a color word would not by itself establish the exact pigments later used on canvas. The secure point is that Gifford placed verbal information beside a drawn view.

The study’s faintness also affects how it is encountered. It asks for closer looking than the more emphatic Peak’s Island sheet. That difference should remain visible: a light notation can be useful to its maker without describing everything at the strength expected of a finished public picture.

A name and a New York address

Page 03 is mostly blank, with Gifford’s name and a New York address near the upper right. Cleveland’s title records 15 Tenth Street. The page is documentary evidence within the sketchbook, not a landscape composition that happens to be unusually empty. ^[4]

Its presence connects a portable travel object with the artist’s urban working life. The book could go to a Maine shore or a mountain prospect while retaining an identifying relation to New York. Field observation and studio practice were parts of the same career.

The Archives of American Art finding aid separately describes his room as studio Number 19 in the Tenth Street Studio Building. That is a different kind of identifier from a street address. The two numbers should not be treated as conflicting versions of the same information. ^[5]

The leaf also gives a useful limit to the word drawing . It contains graphite handwriting, but it serves a different purpose from the landscape studies. Including it makes the range of the sketchbook clearer without artificially increasing the number of illustrated landscape drawings.

Drawing could test a format

The working history of Hook Mountain provides a particularly clear example. Kevin J. Avery describes drawings in which Gifford established the river’s horizontal plane, studied the mountain and shoreline, then turned the book to explore upright compositions. ^[6]

The resulting paintings changed more than their outer proportions. The horizontal Yale canvas keeps a curving beach and a relatively open view, while upright treatments add stronger tree framing and different nearby land. The drawings show the development of several possible solutions around a related subject. ^[6]

This process helps explain why a sketch is not merely a smaller version of a picture already fully determined. It can be a place where the picture’s basic decisions remain open. Changing a boundary or a foreground element alters the spectator’s apparent position as well as the amount of scenery included.

Drawing could compare details and viewpoints

For A Home in the Wilderness ,Avery traces drawings of Mount Hayes, the nearby cabin and lily pads under different lighting conditions. Gifford moved from closer observations toward a broader view across the water, then developed an oil study and the 1866 canvas. ^[6]

These particular preparatory drawings belong to the 1865–1866 sketchbook discussed in the catalogue. They should not be assigned to the 1859 Maine leaves illustrated here simply because Cleveland’s shared description cites the finished painting as an example of his general practice. Keeping the books distinct makes the working history more precise.

The example also joins two scales of thought. A large mountain profile and a small change in the appearance of lily pads can both contribute to one finished composition. Recording the whole view did not eliminate the need to notice details; attention could move back and forth between them.

A drawing could remain useful for years

Franklin Kelly connects Ruins of the Parthenon with a detailed two-page drawing made on the Acropolis in May 1869. The major canvas dates to 1880. Its development demonstrates how material gathered on a journey could remain productive long after the visit. ^[6]

Gifford retained the drawing’s principal organization while adding to the finished arrangement and working intensely on the sky. The drawing supplied a framework; it did not determine every later color or compositional choice. The years between encounter and painting belong to the work’s history rather than an empty gap.

The Rainier subjects offer a shorter interval. Studies dated September 1874 preceded the Seattle canvas of 1875. Together, these examples reveal a practice flexible enough to support both relatively prompt studio development and a much later return to recorded material. ^[6]

Pencil study, oil sketch and finished canvas

The word sketch can describe more than one medium. Gifford’s pencil pages record contours, tonal relationships and written notes. His small oils, such as Valley of the Chugwater , use paint to establish color as well as form. They should not be listed as graphite drawings merely because both belong to field practice.

A finished canvas could develop either kind of material through altered scale, adjusted figures, new atmosphere or a different foreground. The surviving sequences discussed by Kelly and Avery make those changes visible. They do not support one mechanical procedure followed identically for every painting. ^[6]

The distinctions are useful when browsing Gifford’s work. A page with several framed designs, a small oil painted outdoors and a large studio picture can each be complete for its immediate purpose. Their relationship is richer than a simple division between incomplete work and a final product.

Sketchbooks and the archival record

The Archives of American Art finding aid distinguishes papers donated to the repository from material lent only for microfilming. It describes twenty-one sketchbooks within the loaned material and states that the originals were returned to their lenders. Their appearance on microfilm does not mean the Archives owns every original book. ^[5]

The finding aid also records 849 digitized images of the papers, following digitization in 2007. That is a count of collection images described by the aid, not a count of surviving Gifford drawings. Letters, photographs, printed material and other records belong to the collection as well. ^[5]

These distinctions help readers follow references responsibly. A scholarly citation to a drawing on microfilm, an original museum leaf and a typed travel letter can all contribute evidence, but they are different objects encountered through different forms of access. None should silently stand in for all the others.

Reading the surviving leaves

The illustrated pages retain blank paper, binding edges, staining and areas of loss. Those features remind the spectator that the drawings survive within physical books. A composition can occupy only part of a sheet whose remaining space had other uses or was never filled.

Some marks are clearer than others. Close looking can distinguish broad forms and visible writing without making every faint line certain. The same restraint applies to identifying later paintings: a plausible resemblance is a starting point for comparison, while a documented connection supplies stronger evidence.

Seen together, the four Cleveland leaves introduce a practice of looking, remembering and trying alternatives. The coastal view records a place, the small frames test arrangements, the seascape joins words to graphite and the address page locates the book within a working life. Their variety helps explain how drawing could serve Gifford without being confined to one function.