After the Storm

George Inness (American, 1825–94) has painted a landscape with sunlit trees in autumnal foliage in the middle foreground. The distance is still in the shadow of the storm clouds, which show in the sky. There are three cows under the trees to the left, and the figure of a woman is at the right, advancing with a pail in her hand. In the distance, a small, white cottage with a red roof is touched by the sun.

The painting is signed and dated in the lower left corner. Charles Allis purchased this painting from M. Knoedler & Company, through W. H. Dicks in 1912.

Inness was a leading nineteenth-century landscape artist who grew up in the Hudson Valley in a time when Hudson River School artists dominated American landscape painting. As an artist, he was drawn to the lofty ideals of Thomas Cole (1801–48) and the intimacy of Asher B. Durand’s (1796–1886) landscapes. Inness was a Hudson River School artist in his early years. Ultimately, however, he distinguished himself from that group, taking inspiration from Théodore Rousseau, the artists of the French Barbizon School, and the spiritualism of the eighteenth-century philosopher-mystic Emanuel Swedenborg.

In the United States, Inness lived and painted primarily in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New Jersey; he also spent several years in Europe in the 1850s and 1870s, studying and painting. He was a committed abolitionist and believer in social reform. He is often associated with the Tonalists, late nineteenth-century artists such as James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) and Dwight William Tryon (1849–1925) who worked with a dark, neutral palette.