Near the Village, October

In 1878 George Inness stated that the aim of a work of art “is not to instruct, not to edify, but to awaken an emotion.” In this belief, his philosophical notions differed sharply from the those of the Hudson River School. Finding the Creator’s presence in every detail of nature, the Hudson River School painters had devotedly recorded dramatic sites and natural effects to deliver moral lessons. Beginning in the 1870s, however, a number of American artists took a cue from the French painters working near Barbizon and developed a preference for more unified, intimate, suggestive images of nature. Their leader was Inness, who produced some of the most powerfully expressive landscapes of any American of his generation.

"Near the Village, October" is one of an impressive group of refined and contemplative works from the last few years of the artist’s life. Inness embraced the Swedenborgian religion, which emphasizes correspondences between the natural world and the world of the afterlife. The tenets of Swedenborgianism are not manifested literally in Inness's paintings, but the late works, in which the physical appears to be dematerialized, seem to resonate with his faith. Inness chose to set many of these works in autumn, when nature’s colors are most radiant, and often preferred the sharply contrasting light and shadow of late afternoon. "Near the Village, October" is distinguished by dense pigment, bold hues, flattened space, and compositional division into horizontal bands punctuated at deliberate intervals by vertical lines. These features create an asymmetrical, decorative pattern that prefigures the abstract paintings of the twentieth century.