Landscape
SANFORD ROBINSON GIFFORD (American, 1823–1880)
Long Branch Beach, 1867
Oil on canvas, 9 x 19 1/2 in.
Signed and dated (at lower right): S. R. GIFFORD 1867
RECORDED: J. F. (John Ferguson) Weir, A Memorial Catalogue of the Paintings of Sanford Robinson Gifford, N.A. (1881), p. 31, no. 414 // Whitney Museum of American Art, Catalogue of the Collection (New York: 1974), p. 149 // Ila Weiss, Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823–1880) (New York: Garland Publishing Co., 1977), no. VII K 4 // Ila Weiss, Poetic Landscape: The Art and Experience of Sanford R. Gifford (Newark, Delaware: University of Delaware Press, 1987), p. 263 illus.
EXHIBITED: Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York, November 19, 1948–January 16, 1949, The Coast and the Sea, no. 48 // Whitney Museum of Art, New York, June 10–September 7, 1975, Seascape and the American Imagination, pp. 96–97 no. 46 fig. 102 illus. // National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., October 1998–February 1999 // The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, October 8, 2003–February 8, 2004; Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, March 6–May 16, 2004; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., June 27–September 26, 2004, Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford, no. 45
EX COLL.: J. B. Bostwick, Brooklyn, by 1881; [Harry Shaw Newman Gallery, New York, 1948]; Dr. Allan Roos and Mrs. B. Matthieu Roos, until 1971; to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, until 1998; to sale, Sotheby’s New York, May 20, 1998, lot 104; to [Hirschl and Adler Galleries, New York, 1998]; to Jo Ann and Julian Ganz, Jr. Los Angeles, 1998; to sale, Sotheby’s New York, December 3, 2008, lot 5; to Richard Manoogian Collection, Detroit, Michigan; to [Babcock Galleries, New York]; to Burrichter-Kierlin Collection, Winona, Minnesota, 2013 until 2023
Gifford’s choice of subject in Long Branch Beach is distinctive. The most famous image of this popular New Jersey resort is Winslow Homer’s 1869 painting, Long Branch (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), showing stylishly dressed visitors on the bluff overlooking the beach, promenading, and peering at the bathers below. This was a true picture of Long Branch, but not the Long Branch that attracted Gifford. The area has a history that goes back to the Lenni Lenape native Americans who regularly visited the shore to harvest the fish that were plentiful in coastal waters. Europeans followed suit, settling in the latter half of the seventeenth century, and fishing the abundant waters. Long Branch is named for the southern tributary of the Shrewsbury River that forms the northern boundary of the town. Through the early years of American independence, small scale commercial fisherfolk sent their catch to local markets in Philadelphia and New York. By the end of the eighteenth century, residents of the coastal area discovered an additional source of income, lucrative and easily managed. Short-term paying guests came to boarding houses to seek the healthful benefits of sea air and ocean bathing. The nineteenth century saw a process of what had begun as modest boarding houses turning into larger boarding houses and then the construction of purpose-built luxury hotels. The initial visitors tended to be well-off Philadelphians, but with the advent of steamship service from New York (around 1830) and later, rail lines (from 1860), Long Branch became a convenient destination for New Yorkers. In 1861, Mary Todd Lincoln, first Lady of the beleaguered nation, chose Long Branch for a summer respite from the heat, dust, and politics of the District of Columbia. By the time that Mrs. Lincoln arrived, Long Branch already boasted over 4,000 guest rooms. Mrs. Lincoln’s presence ushered in the era of Long Branch as a celebrity resort, a place to see and be seen. That is the Long Branch that Homer painted in 1869. Ulysses S. Grant first arrived in Long Branch in 1867. In 1869, the newly elected President took possession of his Long Branch “cottage,” making the town the nation’s de facto summer Capital. Gifford, in 1867, certainly was aware of the glitter and the chic. That is not what he painted.
Long Branch Beach employs the classic luminist canvas shape, a long, low vista of sand and sky, twice as long as it is high. The sky takes up a generous upper half of the picture. The foreground, an edge-to-edge expanse of sand, is carefully composed with vertical tracks leading to a horizontal band of detail that includes a sliver of ocean on the left, the Long Branch bluffs on the right, and groups of figures engaged in a variety of activities on the beach. Two people are at the shoreline, one standing, one bending over the lapping water. Gentle waves break just offshore forming a diagonal line. Small fishing boats sit on the beach. A sailboat is barely visible at the horizon line.
The boats on the beach were used for pound fishing, a technique employed by Canadian First Peoples that spread to the Carolinas in the United States, then to the Great lakes, and by the 1850s to New Jersey. Working from shallow draft boats that could be drawn up on the beach, fishermen would plant stakes in the ocean bottom about a half mile offshore and string nets to catch and trap fish, a precursor to modern trawling. In Gifford’s picture, a trio of fishermen sit on a bright day, shielded from the sun by a cloth, perhaps a sail, while they appear to work at mending a net that extends from their nearby boat which holds a large pile of nets. Two poles are stuck upright in the sand, while others support the sun shelter. Further down the beach are other boats and groups of people clustered around them. At the right, two figures pull on a line, perhaps attached to a boat to bring it further up the beach. The dunes to the right are a natural formation that line the New Jersey coast from Sandy Hook south to Cape May. Over the years they have eroded and reformed further inland, so that areas that were previously beach and dune are now underwater. Gifford’s dunes support a cluster of small structures, perhaps icehouses where fishermen could briefly store the catch before shipping it to urban markets. Homer, in contrast, painted his dunes showing a walkway and a pavilion, all part of a lively social scene. Gifford scatters five small figures among the huts, all looking vaguely purposeful. At the top of the highest dune, a figure is spreading fabric to dry on the dune grass under the bright sun. All this activity is contained on a canvas whose primary impression is that of a tranquil scene of sky and sand on a sunny day at the shore. As was Gifford’s intent, the picture requires sustained concentration to take it all in.
