Sanford Robinson Gifford

Gifford attended Brown University before he moved to New York in 1845 to study painting. He became celebrated for luminous landscapes, which included Hudson River Valley views as well as scenes from his travels abroad.

While visiting Switzerland in 1868 he sketched the Castle of Chillon on Lake Geneva (Lac Léman), a romantic destination for 19th-century travelers. Panoramic photographs that had recently become available to tourists also served as resources for his paintings of the site. Gifford appropriated their horizontal format to capture the radiant expanse of the lake and distant peaks, unifying both sky and water in a rosy atmospheric glow.

The restoration of this frame was made possible by a generous gift from Eli Wilner & Company, New York.