Sanford Robinson Gifford

Twilight in the Adirondacks

Sanford Robinson Gifford’s Twilight in the Adirondacks explores the beauty and variability of nature. The artist painted multiple variations of this composition, manipulating the sunsets’ colors to achieve different effects.

Foreboding twilight scenes were a favored subject for Gifford around this time, possibly due to the fact that the painter was a soldier in the Civil War, and had recently lost his brother. Twilight in the Adirondacks uses a dramatic red sunset to symbolically refer to the explosive violence and somber mortality of battle. The campers in the lower right foreground represent Gifford’s longing for the prewar days of peaceful, brotherly fellowship spent in the mountains of New York. While stationed in Baltimore, the painter wrote, “I think often of my friends at home, of their quiet, peaceful lives---of the green fields, and the grand mountains, where but for these unhappy times, I would now be. . .”