Siout, Egypt

Although many nineteenth-century American landscape painters traveled abroad in search of subjects, Sanford Gifford was one of the very few who ventured beyond England and the Continent. Early in 1869 he traveled the Nile from Cairo to the first cataract (actually rapids) and back. On March 4 he reached the village of Siout, which lay in the midst of an extensive and fertile plain below the Libyan Hills at the start of a great caravan route running through the Libyan Desert to the Sudan. The town was known for its picturesqueness and its history, having been the capital of the thirteenth nome (province) of Upper Egypt during antiquity and the birthplace of Plotinus, the great Neoplatonic philosopher. Gifford described the view that inspired this painting in his journal:Looking westward, the town with its domes and minarets lay between us and the sun, bathed in a rich and beautiful atmosphere. Behind, on the right, were the yellow cliffs of the Libyan mts., running back into the tender grades of distance. Between us and the town were fields of grain, golden green with the transparent light. On the right was a tent with sheep and beautiful horses, the sunlight sparkling on a splendid white stallion. On the left the road ran in, with a fountain and figures of men and women and camels. The whole glowing and gleaming under the low sun. [1]Siout, Egypt, is the most important and the finest of Gifford's dozen or so known Egyptian works and ably demonstrates his mastery of both atmospheric and linear perspective. The glowing light serves both to give tonal unity and balance to the overall composition and to reveal the myriad details of the scene with exceptional clarity. The result is a work that is less about the physical facts of the scene it depicts and more about the very act of perceiving. As one of the artist's contemporaries wrote:Gifford's art was poetic and reminiscent. . . It was nature passed through the alembic [a device that refines or transmutes through distillation] of a finely organized sensibility. [2](Text by Franklin Kelly, published in the National Gallery of Art exhibition catalogue, Art for the Nation, 2000)Notes1. Journal III (Egypt), March 4, 1867; quoted in Sanford Robinson Gifford [exh. cat., University of Texas Art Museum] (Austin, 1970), 29.2. "Sanford R. Gifford. His Life and Character as Artist and Man," in A Memorial Catalogue of the Paintings of Sanford Robinson Gifford, N.A. [exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art] (New York, 1881), 8.