The Brook, Montclair

The scene in this painting is a view of Toney’s Brook in Montclair, New Jersey, where the mature artist moved with his family to set up his studio in the summer of 1878. It was in Montclair where Inness created some of his most memorable tonalist landscapes. By 1882, the year that The Brook, Montclair was painted, a critic of the New York Evening Post complained that Inness “never gives us a decisive form, never a well-defined contour,” and that “everything with him is softened and is, as it were, melting away.” Another critic writing in that same year in the Boston Advertiser described Inness’ paintings as “hardly more than the ghost of a landscape.”