George Inness
Inness was born on a farm near Newburg, New York, in 1824. The artist showed an early aptitude for drawing as he grew up in New York City and in and around Newark, New Jersey. At the age of thirteen he drew from reproductions provided by a sensitive schoolteacher. Although he was afflicted with fits of epilepsy, a disease people feared and misunderstood, the boy was somewhat frail. In 1839, his father discouraged his artistic talents and gave Inness a grocery store to manage in an attempt to dissuade him from becoming a painter. Disgruntled working with food and the public, in 1841 Inness left home for New York City to work for Sherman and Smith as a map engraver by day and he taught himself to paint with oils by night.
At the age of 19, Inness exhibited a canvas at the National Academy. In 1843, Inness studied for a short period in Brooklyn with Regis Francois Gignoux (1814-1882) who was known for snowy landscapes and views of Niagara Falls. Inness finished an impressive 34 ½ x 49 ¼ inch pastoral view with oxen and figures set in an expansive New Jersey landscape titled Afternoon, 1846 (also Landscape-Afternoon) and exhibited the canvas at the 1846 American Art Union’s “Annual Exhibition” (no. 6) and possibly at the National Academy. Historian Michael Quick (who is compiling the George Inness Catalogue Raisonné) wrote on November 9, 1999, “Afternoon ranks as one of the most beautiful and accomplished painting of Inness’s early period and it shows how talented a draftsman he was at an early age. This canvas is very important to his history and to the history of American art.”
Pictures like Afternoon, 1846 and those painted through 1868 identify Inness with the Hudson River School. The American Art Union helped promote Inness as a formidable landscape painter by reproducing some of his early works and by distributing engravings of them.
In 1847, a collector paid $100 for a canvas by Inness and became his patron. With this success, the artist went to Europe (and again in 1854-1855) and he became enthralled when he studied the rustic scenes of Jean-Francois Millet (1814-1875). Millet’s ability to eliminate the unnecessary and to paint the essential and to display with dignity melancholy views that depicted the sad toil of common laborers inspired Inness. He soon became a follower of the Barbizon painters and was influenced by the works of Narcisse Virgil Diaz de la Pena (1807-1876), Theodore Rousseau (1812-1867) and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875). After 1854, his paintings start to interpret the best artistic techniques of the Barbizon tradition, learning to paint outdoors in the Forest of Fontainbleau. He dissolved hard outlines into a play of color and atmosphere. When he returned to America, he lived and painted in Medfield, MA and he began painting intimate landscapes that utilized broad masses of light and shadow, subtle color harmonies and less emphasis on the picturesque.
From 1870-1874, Inness lived in Italy and painted in the Campagna, Florence, the Alban Hills south of Rome and in France. He began to mute detail and fill canvases with a pervading tonal light and he sought to capture the spirit of nature as it mysteriously changed within atmospheric hazes, mists and natural light. Falling under the spell Swedenborgian mysticism, by 1878, Inness was a spiritualist whose brushwork became more poetical, lyrical and sensuous as his subjects crept into an almost corporeal space.
Inness’s paintings go from being somber, moody and glaze toned to those that take on hints of Impressionism (although Inness did not like that tradition) and blend into the enigmatical or obscure, hidden elements of nature. The artist transformed the luminous romantic realism of the Hudson River tradition into dreamlike expressions of nature that dissolve or fuse lines into atmospheric, pervasive, freely handled naturalism that is expressed uniquely.
Being subjective, Inness observed fact and slowly built up and structured through layers of impasto atmospheres and transcendent visions of nature. Because of this, he is considered one of America’s most talented and gifted landscapists. He said he wanted art to awaken emotions in people. He did not think a painting should have the purpose of appealing to the intellect or the moral senses, and for certain they were not to instruct or teach. His were expressions of American tonalism -- of the colors of moods. Inness said, “The true purpose of a painter is to reproduce in other minds the impression which the scene made on him.” (Quoted from James Thomas Flexner, History of American Painting, NY: Dover Publications, 1962, p. 261.).
In 1853, Inness became a member of the National Academy (NY). Although he exhibited in clubs, he joined no others, perhaps because he was more an egotist and did not lend a consistent or available humble, sympathetic ear. At one moment he could be friendly, helpful and cheerful of painters and the next moment he could be a volatile, critical, snobby, know-it all who could not bare the presence of artists who had lesser reputations than his own. Although he had wealthy patrons, if one offended him he was known to arrogantly reject their offers of vast amounts of money for canvases and discard them as fools. One of his finest, most prestigious friends was also his patron and agent Thomas B. Clarke (1848-1931), who helped sponsor and support for years the grumpy talented artist.
During the 1890s, Inness became so despondent and artistically confused, he repainted over and over again aspects of his canvases. He rejected science as inferior to art and thought Impressionism produced mere reproductions of nature. As he struggled to paint what he thought should be coming from him, he rarely was satisfied, and critics across the country criticized him for redoing aspects of canvases until they were ugly. Because he believed his artistic emotions were of divine origin perhaps he thought nothing he painted was good enough and that was one reason why he repainted canvas after canvas, hoping to find perfection.
After telling a Boston Evening Transcript reporter in 1876 that he wanted to go out west, Inness and his wife Elizabeth finally went to California in 1890. They stayed at Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego before traveling to Pasadena and then to San Francisco to be with painter William Keith (who was also Barbizon-inspired and often compared with or accused of being Inness influenced).
On March 21, 1890, Keith and Inness stayed at the once-luxurious Hotel Del Monte in Monterey and the Monterey Cypress called Keith “the celebrated scenic painter” and Inness “one of the best landscape painters in the world.” Inness and Keith painted in the groves and along the rolling seaside cliffs at Monterey, but Inness painted oaks instead of cypress, kept within the confines of the dramatic Barbizon aesthetic and reworked paintings in Keith’s studio, trying to capture the emotion of the landscape.
Before he left California, the overconfident Inness insulted Keith by stating that Yosemite had never been painted well and that he would show the world someone could paint it. Not only had Keith painted Yosemite beautifully, so had Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Hill and many others, but Inness disregarded them as incompetent when he made that statement. After Inness attempted to capture the essence of Yosemite, he went back to Keith’s studio and admitted he could not paint it. When Inness left California, he offended the talented Keith once again by gifting him his palette, which Keith in turn gifted to a poverty-stricken artist. The two men remained friends and Keith admitted he had been highly influenced by Inness’s visit and so had many other California painters. It is not known if Inness ever completed a masterfully handled oil painting or sketch of Yosemite. None are known today.
Landscape painter George Inness, Jr. (1854-1926) often painted with his father and sometimes the duo worked on the same canvases after 1890. George Inness, Jr. often became frustrated when the Senior Inness attempted to be instructive and helpful because his father often reworked his canvases until he eliminated major aspects of them.
Inness died in Bridge of Allan, Scotland in 1894 an internationally recognized landscape painter of esteem. His estate auction was held at the Union League Club in New York City where one of his Monterey paintings California sold for twelve thousand dollars.
Inness is represented in the permanent collections at the Museum of Fine Art (Boston); Metropolitan Museum of Art; National Museum of American Art; Art Institute of Chicago (20 works); New York Historical Society; Brooklyn Museum of Art; Canajorharie Art Gallery; Cincinnati Art Museum; Carnegie Art Institute; Dallas Museum of Art; Davenport Museum of Art; Arizona State Univ. Art Museum; Arizona Museum of Art; Fogg Art Museum; NAD; PAFA; Newark Art Museum; N.C. Museum of Art; Mead Art Gallery; Indianapolis Museum of Art; The White House; Yale University Art Gallery; New Orleans Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; Montclair Art Museum; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Phoenix Art Museum; Wadsworth Athenaeum; High Museum of Art; Davenport Museum of Art; Toledo Ar Museum; Gilcrease Museum, Stark Museum of Art and more.
Bibliography: Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., The Life and Work of George Inness (NY: Garland Pub. Co., 1977); Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr. and Michael Quick, George Inness (CA: L.A. County Museum of Art, 1985); George Inness, Jr., The Life, Art and Letters of George Inness (NY: 1917); Leroy Ireland, The Works of George Inness: An Illustrated Catalogue Raisonné (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1965); Elizabeth MCCausland, George Inness, An American Landscape Painter (Springfield, MA, 1946); Majorie Dakin Arkelian & George Neubert, George Inness Landscapes: His Signature Years, 1884-1894 (CA: Oakland Museum, 1978) and articles “George Inness, The Artist, the Scholar, and the Man,” Collector, October 1894; Art Interchange, September 1894; Alfred C. Harrison, Jr., “George Inness and the San Francisco art world in the 1890s,” Antiques, November 2000.