George Inness
George Inness
1825 - 1894
Inness began exhibiting his pictures at the National Academy of Design in 1844. His early work, in its emphasis on detail and topographical accuracy, reveals the influence of the prevailing Hudson River School aesthetic as exemplified by such painters as Asher B. Durand. However after making trips to Italy (1851-52) and France (1853-54), he became deeply influenced by the serene, broadly-painted landscapes of Rousseau, Troyen, Daubigny and other members of the French Barbizon School.
In 1860, for reasons of health as well as discouragement with what he felt to be a lack of recognition from local critics and patrons, Inness moved with his family to Medfield, Massachusetts. He remained there for four years and then settled at Eagleswood, an estate near Perth Amboy, New Jersey. It was around this time that he met the painter William Page, who introduced him to the spiritual teachings of the Swedish philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg. Throughout the 1860s, Inness gradually began to abandon many of the precepts associated with the Hudson River style, turning instead to a greater emphasis on mood and poetic effect through the use of rich color and fluid brushwork. One of his major points of divergence involved his vision or concept of the American landscape itself; while the Hudson River painters focused on the untamed wilderness, Inness was drawn to what he once described as the "civilized landscape," where nature was shaped to suit the needs of mankind, a combination of both the real and the ideal.'
In 1870, Inness made another trip to Europe, spending most of his time in Rome. Returning to the United States four years later, he spent a year in Boston before moving back to New York in 1875. In 1878, he bought a home and studio in Montclair, New Jersey, where he would live for the rest of his life. During that same year, he helped to found the Society of American Artists, a group of younger, European influenced artists dissatisfied with the conservative, insular attitude prevailing at the National Academy. In 1882, Inness's work was the subject of a major article by the New York critic Charles De Kay in Century Magazine.2 Two years later, a comprehensive exhibition of his pictures at the American Art Galleries helped further to strengthen his growing reputation.
Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, Inness's art moved towards a greater level of individual expression. He continued to explore various aspects of both style and theory, always turning to color for its emotive potential. He also began to incorporate one, sometimes, two figures into his compositions, evident in such works as The Monk (Addison Gallery of American Art) of 1873.
Inness produced his most original and his most visionary work during the last decade of his life. In paintings such as Sunrise (Metropolitan Museum of Art), he explored mood and feeling through color, diffused light and a limited number of softly defined forms. Many of his pictures from this period are depictions of forest interiors at dawn or twilight. Although the hazy atmospheric qualities and ethereal nature of Inness's late work has led to comparisons with Impressionism (a movement which did inform his work to some extent), his concept of nature -- spiritual, subjective (and thus very modern) -- took him well beyond Impressionism's material and scientific concerns. Indeed, in his emphasis on emotion, his free handling of pigment and in his quiet, harmonious compositions, he was tremendously influential for a younger generation of painters, such as Henry Ward Ranger and Dwight Tryon, whose related aesthetic concerns have since been defined as Tonalism.
During his later years, Inness painted in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut as well as in California and Florida. He traveled to Europe in 1894, visiting Paris, Munich, and Baden. He died in Bridge-of-Allan in Scotland that same year. A prolific artist, Inness is represented in America's most important collections, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and at the Art Institute of Chicago.
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1 See "A Painter on Painting," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 56 (February 1878): 461.
2 See Henry Eckford [pseud, for Charles De Kay], "George Inness," Century Magazine 24 (May 1882): 63.
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