George Inness: 10 works

'George Inness was born in the Hudson River Valley, the region that inspired artist Thomas Cole to create a vision of unspoiled American wilderness. Inness, however, rejected Cole's ideal of untouched nature in favor of a "civilized landscape" that included evidence of man's intervention in nature.'

'Rather than celebrating nature in the tradition of the Hudson River School, George Inness' Lackawanna Valley seems to commemorate the onset of America's industrial age. While documenting the achievements of the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad, Inness has also created a topographically convincing view of Scranton, Pennsylvania.'

'In the 1850s, the Lackawanna railroad company commissioned George Inness to create a series of landscape paintings that celebrated the country's rapid development and progress. Even as Inness worked on this commission, he began moving away from the more realistic style of his teacher Asher Brown Durand and towards looser brushwork and darker, more atmospheric compositions.'

'This work was executed while Inness and his family were living in Medfield, and the scene shown, although not in any way topical, might have been inspired by the landscape of that area. Whatever the case, "Landscape" shows the influence of the French Barbizon school on the young Inness who, just at this time, was moving away from the clarity and detail of his earlier Hudson River School aesthetic.'

'"The Valley of the Olives," is the largest surviving fragment of Inness' monumental painting "The New Jerusalem."'

'Curiously, Lake Albano is dated 1869, the year before Inness returned to Italy to paint Italian views for an American market, so it may have been composed from the artist's stored memories of his Italian sojourns.'

'"Visionary Landscape," is a fragment of Inness' monumental painting "The New Jerusalem."'

'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."'

'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.'

'During the final years of his life, George Inness and his family spent their winters in Tarpon Springs on the Gulf Coast of Florida.'