(b Greenfield, NY, 10 July 1823; d New York, 24 Aug 1880). American painter. He grew up in Hudson, NY, and attended Brown University between 1842 and 1844. He moved to New York in 1845 and studied with the British watercolourist and drawing-master John Rubens Smith (1775-1849), who probably taught him portraiture and topographical rendering. Gifford also enrolled in figure drawing classes at the National Academy of Design and attended anatomy lectures at the Crosby Street Medical College. After a year studying the human figure, he decided to specialize in landscape painting. An admirer of the work of Thomas Cole, he took a sketching trip during the summer of 1846 and visited some of that artist's haunts in the Berkshire and Catskill Mountains. Gifford's earliest works show the combined influence of Cole's style and his own nature studies (e.g. Summer Afternoon, 1853; Newark, NJ, Mus.). He first exhibited his work at the National Academy of Design in 1847, the same year the American Art-Union accepted one of his landscapes for distribution through engraving to its members. The next year the Art-Union showed eight of Gifford's canvases. The National Academy elected him an associate in 1851 and an academician in 1854.

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