Gifford grew up on the Hudson River, in Hudson, just across the river from the Catskill home of Thomas Cole, one of his idols. He briefly attended Brown University, but decided to devote his life to art.

In 1845, Gifford went to New York City where he studied drawing, perspective and anatomy with John Rubens Smith. However, inspired by the American landscaper Cole, he turned to landscape painting. He spent the summer of 1846 on a sketching trip to the Catskills and Berkshires and by 1847, had begun to show his work at the American Art-Union and the National Academy of Design.

Gifford traveled to Europe in 1855, and spent two-and-a-half years exploring the great repositories of art and sketching scenery in England, Scotland, France, the Low Countries, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. In England he was impressed by the color and light in the paintings of J. M. W. Turner, although he considered Turner overdid the effects of dissolving light. Gifford also discussed his work with art critic, John Ruskin and studied the French landscape painters of the Barbizon school. He wrote in his journal of the dangers of surrendering to a particular method or school of painting, lest they usurp the place of Nature."

When the artist returned to America in 1858, Gifford took studio space in the Tenth Street Building, also favored by Frederick E. Church, Worthington Whittredge and Albert Bierstadt. He spent most summers sketching the countryside in the Catskills, the Adirondacks, the Green Mountains in Vermont, the White Mountains in New Hampshire, and various locales in Maine and Nova Scotia.

At this time Gifford began to create works in his mature style, which has become to be known as Luminism. The painter's taste for radiant light and aerial effects distinguished his landscapes from the work of his contemporaries and manifested a personal and poetic strain anticipating later trends in American art. Gifford avoided the prevalent heroic and religious subjects so prominent in the European paintings.

During the early years of the Civil War, Gifford served in New York's renowned Seventh Regiment. His experiences during the war inspired a number of paintings of Union campsites in Virginia and Maryland.

In 1866 he toured the Historic River Towns of Westchester and during that time painted "Morning on the Hudson, Haverstraw Bay," borrowed from the Terra Foundation for the Arts in Chicago for the exhibition. He returned in 1868 when he painted "An Indian Summer's Day on the Hudson Tappan Zee," on loan from a private collection in Washington, DC. One of Gifford's final paintings, "Sunset over the Palisades on the Hudson," was completed in 1879, and is also from a private collection.

After participating in the U.S. Geological Survey of southern Wyoming with Hayden, he returned to Europe and the Middle East until 1879.

Gifford, along with notable artists and civic leaders of the day, was a founder of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1870. After he died in 1880, he was honored with the Metropolitan's first monographic retrospective and a memorial catalogue of his known pictures.

Brought together from museums and private collections in America and abroad, the works in the exhibition include several that have never before been shown. A highlight is Gifford's last major painting, the ethereal masterpiece of sunlight and shadow from 1880, "Ruins of the Parthenon" (Corcoran Gallery of Art).

"Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford," will continue at the Metropolitan through February 8. A full-day scholarly symposium entitled "New Light on American Landscape Painting" will be held at the Metropolitan Museum on Friday, January 23, from 9:45 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium. Free with Museum admission; reservations and tickets not required. For more information, call (212) 570-3710 or e-mail lectures@metmuseum.org.

A book, "Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford," has been published as the catalogue for the exhibition. It features essays examining Gifford's position in the Hudson River School, his subjects, his patrons and his adventures both at home and abroad. More than 70 of the artist's best-known sketches and paintings are discussed and reproduced in color. ($60).