George Inness

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(b Newburgh, NY, 1 May 1825; d Bridge of Allan, Central Scotland, 3 Aug 1894). American painter. He grew up in Newark, NJ, and New York City, and received his first artistic training with John Jesse Barker ( fl 1815-56), an itinerant artist claiming to be a student of Thomas Sully. Between 1841 and 1843 Inness was apprenticed to the engravers Sherman & Smith in New York. More significant was his study in 1843 with Régis-François Gignoux, a student of Paul Delaroche and a recent immigrant from France, whose landscapes were delicate and sweet. Though Gignoux seems to have had little influence on the development of Inness's style, the Frenchman did provide him with a knowledge of European masters. Inness's early attraction to the Old Masters, especially to Claude Lorrain, is evident in his landscapes of the 1840s, and it prompted him to visit Italy in 1851-2. His Bit of the Roman Aqueduct (c. 1852; Atlanta, GA, High Mus. A.) is especially derivative of Claude in its classical composition and descriptive details.

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The American artist George Inness (1825-1894) was primarily a landscape painter, who developed a personal, subjective form of impressionism.

George Inness was born May 1, 1825, near Newburg, N.Y. His family moved in 1829 to Newark, N.J., where Inness was educated and took painting and drawing lessons. In 1841 he worked as a map engraver for a New York firm. He soon gave this up to sketch direct from nature. At the age of 18 he married Delia Miller, who died a few months later. In 1844 he exhibited at the National Academy of Design, and the next year he studied briefly with Régis Gignoux. Inness's earliest pictures show the influence of 17th-century masters such as Claude Lorrain, Gaspard Dughet, and Meindert Hobemma.

In 1847 Inness spent a short time in England and Italy. Three years later he married Elizabeth Hart and spent another 2 years studying and painting in Florence. On returning to New York, he was elected an associate member of the National Academy. Again he returned to Europe, this time to France. Exposure to Camille Corot and the painters of the Barbizon school had a profound effect on Inness's work after 1855. One of his best pictures from this period is the Lackawanna Valley (1855), which shows his new breadth of light and atmosphere as well as an openness of composition and a freshness in the handling of paint.

On his return from France, Inness settled in Medfield, Mass., which became the setting for a number of oils painted during the next 5 years. In the early 1860s he painted in the Adirondacks, Catskills, and Berkshires and also in New Hampshire. He was now in control of his new style, one that allowed him to convey "that subjective mystery of nature with which wherever I went I was filled." Especially appealing were the contrasting moods of nature - sunrise and sunset, calm and storm.

About 1865 Inness met the painter William Page, who introduced him to the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg. A combination of science and religious mysticism, Swedenborgianism provided Inness with a philosophical basis for his art. Inness was in Rome from 1870 to 1872 and in France for the next 2 years. During this period of travel he systematically refined his manner of composing, use of color, and handling of brushwork, making each as effectively expressive as possible. Many of his Italian paintings have a distinctive decorative flatness and elegant juxtaposition of silhouettes, notably The Monk (1873).

In 1875 Inness returned to New York and 3 years later moved to Montclair, N.J., where he painted for most of the rest of his life. His later paintings reveal an increasingly careful sense of design: he mostly relied on dividing his landscapes into foreground and background, with the former subdivided diagonally into approximate halves. Generally, figures and trees are clearly situated within one plane, so that no details are distracting and all design components are harmoniously unified. A typical example is the Coming Storm (1878).

Inness spent the summers of the 1880s variously in Connecticut, Nantucket, Mass., and upstate New York. At the end of the decade he traveled to the western and southern United States, Mexico, and Cuba and in the early 1890s to Florida, California, and Canada. His late work is much more subjective and impressionistic, the landscapes appearing less as specific places and more as hazy memory images. In 1894 he visited Paris, Baden, and Munich. He then went to Scotland, where he died suddenly at the little town of Bridge-of-Allan on August 3.

Further Reading

LeRoy Ireland, The Works of George Inness (1965), is an indispensable reference work which contains an illustrated catalogue raisonné, chronology, list of exhibitions, and complete bibliography, although the prefatory material is short and summary. The fullest published biography is Nicolai Cikovski, George Inness (1971). See also George Inness, Jr., Life, Art, and Letters of George Inness (1917).

For other persons named George Inness, see George Inness (disambiguation).

George Inness
George Inness, 1890
Born	May 1, 1825(1825-05-01) Newburgh, New York
Died	August 3, 1894 (aged 69) Bridge of Allan in Scotland
Nationality	American
Field	Landscape art, Painting
Training	Barbizon school of France
Movement	Tonalism

George Inness (May 1, 1825 -August 3, 1894), was an American landscape painter; born in Newburgh, New York; died at Bridge of Allan in Scotland. His work was influenced, in turn, by that of the old masters, the Hudson River school, the Barbizon school, and, finally, by the theology of Emanuel Swedenborg, whose spiritualism found vivid expression in the work of Inness' maturity. He is best known for these mature works that helped define the Tonalist movement.

Contents 1 Youth 2 Early career 3 Mid-career 4 Late career 5 Citations 6 References 7 Gallery 8 External links

Youth

Inness was the fifth of thirteen children born to John William Inness, a farmer, and his wife, Clarissa Baldwin. His family moved to Newark, New Jersey when he was about five years of age.^[1] In 1839 he studied for several months with an itinerant painter, John Jesse Barker. In his teens, Inness worked as a map engraver in New York City. During this time he attracted the attention of French landscape painter Régis François Gignoux, with whom he subsequently studied. Throughout the mid-1840s he also attended classes at the National Academy of Design, and studied the work of Hudson River School artists Thomas Cole and Asher Durand; "If", Inness later recalled thinking, "these two can be combined, I will try."^[2]

Concurrent with these studies Inness opened his first studio in New York. In 1849 Inness married Delia Miller, who died a few months later. The next year he married Elizabeth Abigail Hart, with whom he would have six children.^[3]

Early career

In 1851 a patron named Ogden Haggerty sponsored Inness' first trip to Europe to paint and study. Inness spent more than a year in Rome, during which time he rented a studio above that of painter William Page, who likely introduced the artist to Swedenborgianism.

The Lackawanna Valley, 1855.

During trips to Paris in the early 1850s, Inness came under the influence of artists working in the Barbizon school of France. Barbizon landscapes were noted for their looser brushwork, darker palette, and emphasis on mood. Inness quickly became the leading American exponent of Barbizon-style painting, which he developed into a highly personal style. In 1854 his son George Inness, Jr., who also became a landscape painter of note, was born in Paris.

In the mid-1850s, Inness was commissioned by the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad to create paintings which documented the progress of DLWRR's growth in early Industrial America. The Lackawanna Valley, painted ca. 1855, represents the railroad's first roundhouse at Scranton, Pennsylvania,^[4] and integrates technology and wilderness within an observed landscape; in time, not only would Inness shun the industrial presence in favor of bucolic or agrarian subjects, but he would produce much of his mature work in the studio, drawing on his visual memory to produce scenes that were often inspired by specific places, yet increasingly concerned with formal considerations.^[5]

Mid-career

Lake Albano, 1869. Phillips Collection.

The work of the 1860s and 1870s often tended toward the panoramic and picturesque, topped by cloud-laden and threatening skies, and included views of his native country (Autumn Oaks, 1878, Metropolitan Museum of Art [1] ; Catskill Mountains, 1870, Art Institute of Chicago), as well as scenes inspired by numerous travels overseas, especially to Italy and France (The Monk, 1873, Addison Gallery of American Art [2] ; Etretat, 1875, Wadsworth Atheneum). In terms of composition, precision of drawing, and the emotive use of color, these paintings placed Inness among the best and most successful landscape painters in America.^[6]

Eventually Inness' art evidenced the influence of the theology of Emanuel Swedenborg. Of particular interest to Inness was the notion that everything in nature had a correspondential relationship with something spiritual and so received an "influx" from God in order to continually exist.

Another influence upon Inness' thinking was William James, also an adherent to Swedenborgianism. In particular, Inness was inspired by James' idea of consciousness as a "stream of thought", as well as his ideas concerning how mystical experience shapes one's perspective toward nature.

Late career

After Inness settled in Montclair, New Jersey in 1885^[7], and particularly in the last decade of his life, this mystical component manifested in his art through a more abstracted handling of shapes, softened edges, and saturated color (October, 1886, Los Angeles County Museum of Art), a profound and dramatic juxtaposition of sky and earth (Early Autumn, Montclair, 1888, Montclair Art Museum [3]), an emphasis on the intimate landscape view (Sunset in the Woods, 1891, Corcoran Gallery of Art), and an increasingly personal, spontaneous, and often violent handling of paint.^{[8] [9]}

Summer Landscape, 1894.

It is this last quality in particular which distinguishes Inness from those painters of like sympathies who are characterized as Luminists.^[10]

In a published interview, Inness maintained that "The true use of art is, first, to cultivate the artist's own spiritual nature." ^[11] His abiding interest in spiritual and emotional considerations did not preclude Inness from undertaking a scientific study of color,^[12] nor a mathematical,^[13] structural approach to composition: "The poetic quality is not obtained by eschewing any truths of fact or of Nature...Poetry is the vision of reality." ^[14]

Inness died while in Scotland in 1894. According to his son, he was viewing the sunset, when he threw up his hands into the air and exclaimed, "My God! oh, how beautiful!", fell to the ground, and died minutes later.^[15]

Citations

1. ^ Bell, Adrienne Baxter: George Inness and the Visionary Landscape, page 151. George Braziller, Inc., 2003.
2. ^ Bell, page 151, 2003.
3. ^ Bell, page 152, 2003.
4. ^ Cikovsky, Nicolai: George Inness, page 74. Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1985. In Cikovsky's estimation, " This painting is undoubtably not only the finest of Inness' early paintings; it is also one of the finest he ever painted."
5. ^ Cikovsky, page 154, 1985.
6. ^ In 1899, several years after Inness' death, a small landscape, Gray, Lowery Day, 1877, sold for over $10,000. Cikovsky, page 142, 1985.
7. ^ "Montclair Art Museum Gallery Will Be Dedicated to Works by George Inness", Montclair Art Museum. Accessed June 4, 2008. "George Inness settled in Montclair, New Jersey in 1885, living and working there until his death in 1894."
8. ^ "The energy of his attack upon a canvas (in this case it was literally an attack), the rapidity and accuracy of his drawing and brushwork and the amount of space he would cover in a few moments, was simply marvelous to watch". Account of Arthur Turnbull Hill, Bell, page 46, 2003.
9. ^ As early as 1871, in Old Aqueduct, Camapagna, Rome, his powers of suggestion are already evident, as described in this unique passage: "In this landscape painting, he used the virtuosic brushstroke not so much to represent sheep as to present to his viewers the ontological essence of sheep." Bell, page 138, 2003.
10. ^ Bell, page 37, 2004.
11. ^ "A Painter on Painting", Harper's New Monthly Magazine 56, page 461. February 1878.
12. ^ "You can only achieve something if you have an ambition so powerful as to forget yourself, or if you are up on the science of your art. If a man can be an eternal God when he is outside, then he is all right; if not, he must fall back on science." Cikovsky, page 136, 1985.
13. ^ Bell, page 28, 2004.
14. ^ Cikovsky, page 182, 1985.
15. ^ Bell, page 64, 2004.

References

Bell, Adrienne Baxter. George Inness and the Visionary Landscape. 2003. ISBN 0-8076-1525-0.

Gallery

Sunset on the Passaic, oil on canvas painting by George Inness, 1891, Honolulu Academy of Arts	In the Roman Campagna, oil on canvas painting by George Inness, 1873, Saint Louis Art Museum	Old Elm at Medfield oil painting by George Inness	Early Morning, Tarpon Springs oil painting by George Inness, 1892
Pool in the Woods, oil painting by George Inness

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: George Inness

• 199 works by George Inness at www.GeorgeInness.org
• George Inness on artchive.com
• ArtCyclopedia: George Inness
• Inness on AskArt.com
• Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute 2008 exhibition "Like Breath on Glass: Whistler, Inness, and the Art of Painting Softly."

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