A Coming Storm, 1863 Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823-1880)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Sanford Robinson Gifford also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting A Coming Storm is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

We offer free shipping as well as paid express transportation services.

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The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

A slab of dark cloud presses down from the right, as if it has weight. Beneath it, Lake George lies strangely calm, a long, steel-blue mirror that keeps its composure even while the sky loses theirs. Sanford Robinson Gifford sets up this uneasy truce between weather and water with the confidence of someone who has watched storms arrive in real time, not just imagined them in a studio.

Look at the shoreline on the left: autumn trees burn in cinnabar and amber, with a few sharper notes of vermilion tucked among the foliage. That warmth is not comfort. It feels like the last flare of a day about to be extinguished. A pale rock face and a single pine stand out crisply, then the land slips into a broader sweep of forest and, beyond, a cool, distant ridge. Depth is handled like breath: clear near at hand, thinning as it goes.

Light does the real drama. In the center, a washed, pearly opening in the clouds drops a curtain of rain or mist, turning the far mountains into softened silhouettes. Gifford’s paint shifts here from dense, shadowed passages to something more veiled, as if laid on in thin glazes and gentle scumbles. One can even notice a small quirk of observation: along the water’s edge, the reflection of the orange trees is slightly broken, a faint tremor in the brushwork that suggests the first stir of wind. Hear it, almost - that hush before the downpour.

Painted in 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, this is not just meteorology. Sanford Robinson Gifford served in the Union Army, and it is hard not to feel that history in the pressure of the sky. Later viewers felt it too. Herman Melville, seeing the picture shortly after Lincoln’s death, wrote of a “demon-cloud” bursting upon a spirit “as mild / As this urned lake.” That word “mild” is key: the lake’s steadiness becomes a kind of moral calm, tested by what advances.

Gifford alone makes weather into character. Perhaps that is why this landscape, for all its beauty, leaves you with the sensation of ozone in the air and a slightly tightened chest - like Turner's tempests translated into the quieter, clearer language of the Hudson River School. Standing before A Coming Storm at the Philadelphia Museum of Art Pennsylvania, you may find yourself waiting, not for lightning, but for whatever news the dark is about to bring.