Sketchbook: Mount Desert Island, Maine 1864

Curator: Sanford Robinson Gifford, born in 1823, filled this sketchbook with studies of Mount Desert Island, Maine. Editor: It looks weighty, somehow. Like a closed book holding the silence of untouched nature. There's a certain history implied in its worn edges. Curator: Sketchbooks become charged objects, repositories of vision and experience. Gifford's hand carried this, his eye capturing the transient light of the island. We see the world filtered through his artistic sensibility. Editor: And how does his experience relate to the people of the island? Did Gifford consider how his presence might be affecting that space? It's worth wondering about the power dynamics implicit in landscape art. Curator: That's a vital question. But even without knowing the sketches themselves, the object resonates with the memory of artistic exploration. Editor: Ultimately, it prompts consideration of our own interactions with landscapes, and the stories we choose to tell about them. Curator: Indeed, a small object holding within it a vast range of historical and cultural echoes.