Sale: Gifford Estate Sale, Thomas E. Kirby and Co., New York, April 28 and 29, 1881, (probably) no. 119 (as Assouan, Egypt)
W.S. Gurnee
Isabella Gurnee Thorndike
Preservation Society of Newport County, Newport, Rhode Island
Vose Galleries, Boston, Massachusetts, 1969
Webster and Douglas Collins, Longmeadow, Massachusetts, 1969
Vose Galleries, Boston, Massachusetts, 1972
Acquired by th🅘e present owner from the above, 1972

(probably) New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Memorial Collection of the Works of the Late Sanford R. Gifford, October 1880-March 1881, no. 54, p. 7 (as Assouan, Egypt, a study)
Austin, Texas, University of Texas Art Museum; Albany, New York, The Albany Institute of History and Art; New York, Hirschl & Adler Galleries, Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823-1880), October 1970-February 1971, no. 45, pp. 28, 67, illustrated (as The Desert at Assouan)
Santa Barbara, California, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, American Paintings, Watercolors and Drawings from the Collection of Jo Ann and Julian Ganz, Jr., June-July 1973, no. 34
Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art; Fort Worth, Texas, Amon Carter Museum; Los Angeles, California, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Nineteenth-Century Art from the Collection of Jo Ann and Julian Ganz, Jr., October 1981-September 1982, p. 133, illustrated p. 32
New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Fort Worth, Texas, Amon Carter Museum; Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford, October 2003-June 2004,𓃲 no. 47, p. 192, il🥀lustrated in color p. 193

Sanford Robinson Gifford traveled to Egypt in early 1869 during his second sojourn abroad, painting The Desert at Assouan while on an excursion along the Nile. Gifford spent several weeks in Cairo observing the city and its people before boarding an 80-foot dahabeah, an Egyptian sailing vessel, to travel up the Nile to the edge of Nubia and back - a distance of over a thousand miles. Because of the dahabeah's dependence on winds and currents, the trip proceeded at a leisurely pace; Gifford  wrote, "It is so easy to lie on the deck cushions and read pleasant books, under this broad, pure and tender sky, and look off now and then at the fringes of waving palms, and at the golden light and delicate purple shadows of the Arabian and Libian [sic] mountains." Gifford's accounts of his travels are preserved in a journal written as a series of letters to his family and are filled with his observations of the local scenery, as well as the customs, dress, and behavior of the local people. Gifford's descriptions of dining and dancing with the Egyptians and Nubians, fending off thieves and sliding down 500-foot sand dunes, all while keeping an eye out for croco🧸diles, creates a vivid and compelling depiction of Victorian era Egypt.

When not engaged in on-shore adventures, Gifford completed oil studies such as the present work, probably painted around mid-February as he approached the edge of the Nubian desert near the city of Aswan  where the thermometer read "94 [degrees] in the shade." He observed, "The desert comes close to the Nile on either side. There is only room for a few straggling palms here and there. The yellow sands have swallowed up the green plain." On February 15 he continued "After breakfast we mounted our gallant donkeys and took our way thro' the town and thro' the vast desolate cemetery on the desert hills beyond and five miles over a desert plain of sand bordered on either hand by broken hills of granite boulders, across which sun-smitten plain we passed straggling Nubians and Bedouins and trains of laden camels coming and going between Assouan [sic] and the Nubian side of the cataract. We met one splendid looking Bedouin mounted on a dromedary. From the richness of his dress he must have been a sheik. He saluted us courteously as he passed, carrying his hand to his mouth, forehead and breast in oriental fashion. It is not very often that these people salute strangers." The Desert at Assouan, Egypt, with its open expanse punctuated by granite outcroppings and a small caravan of camels, may have been painted the following morning when he "went out into the desert to make some notes. This wild, strange scenery, so desolate and so savage, interests me more than anything I have seen in Egypt. I was intent on trying to seize its simple but evasive lines." While this strikingly spare and elegant image is devoid of any of the usual feat🍸ures of traditional landscape painting, such as trees, lakes and strꦰeams, Gifford has translated the vast expanse of the desert onto canvas using rocks to anchor the foreground, middleground and background to convey the grandeur of Egypt's sandy plains.