George Inness

"Life and Letters of George Inness" by George Inness, Jr.;George Inness (American, 1825-1894)

"A small, nervous man, with ragged hair and beard, and a vicious manner, an excellent talker and much occupied with theories and methods of painting, and also religion… on the whole he was an interesting man and undoubtedly one of the first American painters."

-- Maitland Armstrong, painter and American consul to Rome on Inness.

Many rank George Inness with Homer, Eakins and Ryder as a master of nineteenth-century American painting. Certainly he profoundly influenced the landscape painters who followed him.

Inness’ early work was very much in the prevailing style of the Hudson River School. Several trips to Europe brought him into contact with the work of the Barbizon painters and brought stronger color and a new looseness into his own compositions. In his late work, however, from 1880 on, he achieved the melding of the natural world with the spiritual that he sought, and created landscapes of extraordinary power.

Inness was born in Newburgh, New York, in 1825. He suffered from epilepsy, a condition that always affected his health. Because of his affliction, his formal education was sketchy. He was raised in Newark, New Jersey, had a brief stint running a grocery store for his father and was apprenticed for two years to an engraver in New York City.

His only training in the basics of painting came from an itinerant painter and from Regis Gignoux, an academic French painter who was working in Brooklyn at the time. Neither of them had a lasting effect on Inness, who always maintained that he was self-taught.

The work of Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand as well as Old Master prints were his true models; he sought to surpass them. Prevented by his epilepsy from taking long hikes in the wild, he chose pastoral scenes close to home. Even in the 1840s, however, Inness did not portray what he saw literally. He tried to project his own vision into his paintings.

By 1850, his reputation was solid enough for a patron to send him to Italy to study. Having recently married, Inness and his new wife sailed directly to Italy, spending the first part of their trip in Florence, and later moving to Rome. In 1870 he would return to more thoroughly travel Italy, painting in the environs of Rome; the Alban Hills, Tivoli, Anzio, and in the summers as far as Peruggia, Venice, and The Tyrol. His acquaintances in Italy included the poet and painter T. Buchanan Read, and artist Elihu Vedder. In Italy Inness painted some 200 works, mostly in his second visit.

After his first European visit was cut short, Inness returned to New York by way of Paris and the Salons of the Barbizon School in 1852. He returned to Europe two years later, this time to France. It was at this time that he came more fully under the Barbizon influence and Rousseau, Daubigny and Corot became his new idols.

New Yorkers were not impressed by the new direction of his work, however. Irritated, he moved to Medfield, near Boston, for five years. Later, he returned to New Jersey and settled down, surrounded by the countryside he had loved as a boy. Through the 1860s Inness’ most successful works were panoramas, full of light and almost lyrical color. To avoid foreground detail, he moved protruding objects, such as trees and animals, into the middle distance where they did not have to be sharply defined. Often mist obscured the distance.

In 1863, he was introduced to the writing of Emmanuel Swedenborg, the Scandanavian theologian. It was a landmark event in his life. Here at last was a faith that reinforced his own notion that there was a direct correlation between the real world and the spiritual. He was striving to realize this connection in his work.

His interest in Swedenborg influenced his late work more and more. His forms became more and more indistinct, almost as if they were posed midway between the natural world and a heavenly world. In his best paintings an almost abstract quality appeared.

Inness was a frenzied painter, according to his son, who also became a painter. He would work and rework a canvas, sometimes painting an entirely different imaginary scene on top of an almost finished work. After a night of frantic painting he would sometimes collapse, from either exhaustion or epilepsy. Innes died on a recuperative trip to Scotland in 1894.

While the quality of Inness’ output varied widely, his best paintings stand as some of the finest landscapes ever painted in America.

Source:

Zellman, Michael David. American Art Analogy, vol1.1986

[Taken from internet web site of Comenos Fine Arts, Boston, www.comenosfinearts.com, 2/7/2000 --jag]