George Inness

The most successful landscape painter of nineteenth-century America, George Inness pioneered an expressive approach to art based on his conviction that the role of the artist was to interpret nature, rather than merely to depict it. Inness spent much of his childhood in Newark, New Jersey. He drew his early interest in art from engraved reproductions of European masterworks while he worked as an apprentice engraver in New York City. In the mid-1840s, he studied briefly with French landscape painter Régis-François Gignoux (1816–1882), a member of the the Hudson River school, a movement that celebrated the landscape around the Hudson River Valley in upstate New York in highly detailed, naturalistic representations. Inness’s early paintings borrowed the meticulous detail of the movement, but his work was distinguished by an emphasis on mood and a penchant for what he called the “civilized” landscape, rather than the rugged wilderness popular with his contemporaries.

On the second of his three visits to Europe, in 1853–1854, Inness encountered the landscapes of several French painters working around the village of Barbizon, near Paris. The informal subjects and loose, expressive brushwork of the Barbizon School’s intimate landscapes encouraged Inness in his quest for an art of association and subjective emotion. His art was little understood, however, and in 1860, in poor health, he left the art center of New York City, eventually settling in Eagleswood, a utopian community near Perth Amboy, New Jersey. There, the visionary American painter William Page (1811–1885) introduced Inness to the beliefs of eighteenth-century Swedish philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg, who posited a mystical correspondence between the realms of the spiritual world—the “world of causes”—and the material world, the “world of effects.” Inness began to emphasize meaning and expression in his paintings. He spent the years between 1870 and 1875 in Italy and France. On his return he established a studio in New York’s University Building and acquired a home and studio in nearby Montclair, New Jersey. By the late 1870s, Inness’s ideas about art began to receive some respect, and in 1884 a comprehensive exhibition of his work established the high reputation he enjoyed for the remainder of his career.

Between 1870 and the mid-1880s, Inness turned to vibrant color to express the moods and drama of nature, and began to include figures, often prominently, in his landscapes. In his final decade, he blurred or simply abandoned natural detail and form, expressing meaning directly through color, light, and manipulated paint. The nearly abstract qualities of his late landscapes correspond to the interests of such avant-garde contemporaries as the iconoclastic American expatriate painter James McNeill Whistler and the French impressionists, whose paintings recorded the optical effects of reflected light and color. Inness, however, subjugated painting’s formal qualities to the expression of spiritual values and emotion. Notorious among his contemporaries for tampering, sometimes disastrously, with his own works, he believed that the artist’s achievement consisted as much in the creative process as in the material product. This conviction, along with his pursuit of an art of evocation and spiritual mediation, mark Inness as a forerunner of twentieth-century modernism.