Identity Theft: How a Cropsey Became a Gifford

November 21, 2009 - March 28, 2010

Mint Museum of Art

Image from exhibition - if allowed

Identity Theft centers around what is perhaps the Mint Museum’s most important Hudson River School painting, Sanford Robinson Gifford’s Indian Summer in the White Mountains, which was for many years attributed to Jasper Francis Cropsey and titled Mount Washington from Lake Sebago, Maine.  Although long questioned by Gifford scholar Ila Weiss, Indian Summer in the White Mountains remained attributed to Cropsey based on the apparently original signature and date in the lower left corner of the painting.  Recent conservation work revealed a Gifford signature and a new date beneath Cropsey’s –a find that presents the Museum with a unique opportunity to share with our visitors a number of fascinating professional and art historical issues.

Presented, perhaps, as a kind of historical detective story, this small but engaging project will not only allow visitors to see how issues such as conservation, provenance, and scholarship play out in the museum, but will give them both a sneak peek into the “behind the scenes” aspects of museum life.  By bringing together strong examples of both Cropsey and Gifford’s work, this show will encourage them to look carefully and will allow them to see for themselves why a painting might be attributed to one artist or another, and ultimately why our Cropsey “became” a Gifford.  Although the exhibition is small in scale, its approach to its subject, as well as the sense of intimacy with a work of art that it fosters and the methods of looking, thinking, and questioning, that visitors are encouraged to use, all dovetail beautifully with many of the Museum’s stated exhibition objectives, including, but not limited to: “to advance knowledge and appreciation for art”; “to interpret the Museums’ collections to its visitors”; “to explore art and its innovations, and the art history that fosters understanding and appreciation”; “to introduce theories of connoisseurship that enhance understanding and appreciation of diverse cultures and forms of artistic production”; “to present original scholarly contributions to the field of art history, aesthetic theory and social/historical commentary”; and, finally, “to use exhibition design to initiate a direct exchange between visitor and art”. 

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