A Sketch of Clay Bluffs on No Man’s Land, not signed or
dated, is the larger and later of two versions of the subject by Sanford
Gifford that have recently come to light.[i] Gifford completed as many as six
paintings, three dated 1877, one 1878, that must all stem from one recorded
visit he made in October 1877 to the small, now uninhabited island today known
as Noman's Land, three miles southwest of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.[ii]
The artist’s primary objective may have been fishing, an avid pursuit of
Gifford’s that he depicted in three of the paintings of Noman's Land. In two of
those works, the artist essentially flipped the point of view, shifting the
island’s eastern bluffs from left to right and silhouetting them in the glare
of a visible sunset.[iii]

In the handling of the terrain, the present painting is
richly executed, with buttery strokes of pale earthen pink, tan, and buff
pigments, in some places seemingly dashed onto the canvas, yet cohering
marvelously to convey the solid yet friable nature of the mostly sedimentary
geology, as well as the warmth imparted to it by the broad light of a clear
late morning or midday sun. The beach, punctuated by large boulders, appears to
mingle sandy and solid surfaces, up to which, at right, gentle ocean surf breaks
ashore. Contrastingly, the sky is rendered mat with something like pointillist
application: small, unmodulated daubs, blue gray above and grading into a dull
rose at the horizon, akin to the warmth of the bluffs. The artist sketched in
at least five rudimentary human figures, one nearest the viewer at far left,
one most distant on the base of the bluff at right, and three at center, two
standing and one seated in profile.

Of the known paintings of Noman’s Land, the present work and
another bearing the same title, signed and dated 1877, appear very closely
related, as if done in succession, even possibly worked on the same day.[iv] It
is easy to imagine the dated painting as dependent on the present one as a
template, but embellished with a fisherman seated on a chair on an elevated
dock, overlooking ranks of small breakers rolling to the shore, now nearly
consumed by a risen tide. In the dated picture, the artist also broadened the
point of view, setting the bluffs at a farther remove from the viewer and
lending more picture space to the ocean horizon and the surf. In the present
painting, what appears to be late morning or midday sunlight from high above
the setting, in the dated picture becomes a low, late afternoon glare trending
from the left, presumably west. It warms and saturates the tint of the bluffs
even more than those in the present painting and casts slender cool shadows
from the nearer bluff at left onto the farther. If the sequencing here can be
only theoretical, the essential kinship between the present painting and the
dated one looks undeniable.

The whereabouts of the present painting were unknown when
The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art mounted a major
retrospective of Sanford Gifford’s work, in 2003. But the dated version of the
subject that includes the fisherman, described above, was identified in the
exhibition catalogue by the same title.[v] The titling undoubtedly originated
in a reference in the 1881 memorial catalogue of Gifford’s known work: no. 656,
“A Sketch of Clay Bluffs on No Man’s Land,” listed as “Not Dated,” dimensions 9
x 16 ½ inches, “Owned by the Estate.” [vi] Those are all features and
circumstances consistent, less with the painting including the fisherman, than
with those of the present work. The verso of the canvas bears a Gifford estate
sale stamp: the painting is undoubtedly the “Clay’s [sic] Bluff on No Man’s
Land. Not Dated. 9 x 16 ½,” sold at Kirby’s and Co. auctioneers at 845
Broadway, on Thursday, 28 April 1881, eight months after the artist’s death;
the sale catalogue entry includes a reference to the memorial catalogue entry,
no. 656, cited above.[vii] The dated painting of the same title that has been
described by previous authors as no. 656 may well be Memorial Catalogue no.
659, “Bass-Fishing at No Man’s Land, a Study. Dated 1877.” According to the
catalogue, that picture by 1881 had been sold to a private collector in
Providence.[viii]

As fine a work as the dated painting is, in the present one
Gifford managed his most fully realized direct impression of what he found when
he reached Noman’s Land in October 1877. The only other sketch in oils known,
presumably preceding this one, is relatively raw, cramped and cursory, while
the glowing, dated painting described above (probably “Bass-fishing at No Man’s
Land, a Study”), betrays premeditated schemes, such as the converging
perspective lines of the waves that mark the distance to the principal motif of
the bluffs beyond. The synthetic impulse detectable in the dated painting
became only stronger in what must be Gifford’s ultimate conception of the
subject, the large Sunset on the Shore of No Man’s Land—Bass Fishing, dated
1878 (private collection). There, in familiar homage to his artistic exemplar,
J. M. W. Turner (and, to a lesser extent, to his New York colleague Frederic E.
Church), Gifford reached for the radiance and spatial breadth of what he termed
his “Chief Pictures,” reversing the point of view toward the blinding sun,
suspended above the ocean horizon, with the silhouetted bluffs towering above
at right. In contrast, the newly revealed Clay Bluffs on No Man’s Land betrays
the freshness, even strangeness, of discovery—of a virtually deserted isle in
the Atlantic that, for Gifford, might have felt at first like another planet.

[i] The other painting, No Man’s Land (private collection),
shown to the author in 2016 and again earlier this year, is smaller and
probably earlier, to judge from its more cursory execution; also alluded to
below in the text.

[ii] “Reopening the Studios,” New York Tribune, 13 October
1877, p. 2: “Mr. Sandford [sic] R. Gifford has found a new haunt on No Man’s
Land, a dreary island, inhabited by three families, south of Martha’s Vineyard.
What he has found there is still unknown; hence there will be the greater
curiosity to see his new work.” In the twentieth century Noman’s Land, all of
612 acres, became completely deserted, and was used by the United State Navy as
a bombing range until 1996. Today it is a wildlife sanctuary. For discussion of
the site and some of Gifford’s paintings of it, see Ila Weiss, Sanford Robinson
Gifford (1823-1880). Ph.D. diss, Columbia University, 1968. Rpt. New York:
Garland Publishing, 1977, p. 347 and fig. IX I 4: a now unlocated study of a an
escarpment with pine tree overlooking the sea, dated October 3, 1877,
illustrated and discussed by Weiss as possibly a Noman’s Land subject is almost
certainly not one, since it was made more than a week before the New York
Tribune located the artist at Noman’s Land and two weeks before the artist
dated his earliest recorded Noman’s Land subject, A Sketch of No Man’s Land,
dated October 22d, 1877 (location unknown). The dated sketch is recorded in A
Memorial Catalogue of the Paintings of Sanford Robinson Gifford, N. A. (New
York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1881), no. 655. Moreover, Weiss did not
cite the study again in her 1987 monograph on Gifford, cited here: Ila S.
Weiss, Poetic Landscape: The Art and Experience of Sanford R. Gifford (Newark:
University of Delaware Press, 1987), pp. 310-311; Ila Weiss, “Reflections on
Gifford’s Art,” in Sanford R. Gifford, exhibition catalogue (New York:
Alexander Gallery, 1986), n.p. and no. 41; Kevin J. Avery and Franklin Kelly,
eds., Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford,
exhibition catalogue, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery
of Art (New York and Washington, D.C., 2003), pp. 219-221; Kevin J. Avery, “The
Enchantment of Sanford R. Gifford,” in Kevin J. Avery and Donald A.
Christensen, An Artist’s Legacy and a Dealer’s Admiration: Paintings by Sanford
Robinson Gifford from Important American Collections, exhibition catalogue (New
York: Michael Altman Fine Art and Advisory Services, 2012), pp. 130-131.

[iii] The two works mentioned are Sunset on the Shore of No
Man’s Land—Bass Fishing, and Study for ‘Sunset on the Shore of No Man’s
Land—Bass Fishing (both private collection), also discussed below in the text;
for the former, larger work, see Weiss 1987, p. 310-11; Franklin Kelly, “Sunset
on the Shore of No Man’s Land—Bass Fishing” in Avery and Kelly 2003, pp.
219-220.

[iv] Kelly, in Avery and Kelly 2003, p. 220, proposes that
the dated painting “may have been developed from a study made on the spot.” If
so, that would likely be the present work.

[v] Kelly, in Avery and Kelly, p. 219: in the entry, the
dated painting is identified with Memorial Catalogue

no. 656, i.e., the present work; see also Alexander Gallery
1986, no. 41; and Weiss 1987, p. 311, where the same identification is made.

[vi] Memorial Catalogue, no. 656.

[vii] Catalogue of Valuable Oil Paintings, works of the
Famous Artist, Sanford R. Gifford, Deceased, to be Sold without Reserve, by
Order of the Executors, sale catalogue (Thomas E. Kirby and Co., Auctioneers,
1881), 28 April 1881, no. 67.

[viii] Memorial Catalogue, no. 659: The owner of the
painting in 1881 was reportedly Walter J. Comstock of Providence, R.I., and the
dimensions recorded as 8 x 15 inches, smaller than the dated work described
here. However, discrepancies between reported and actual dimensions for known
paintings are frequent in the Memorial Catalogue, and are in some cases
attributable to the presumed circumstance that the catalogue compilers lacked
direct access to paintings then in distant private collections.