Artists George Inness

George Inness

American Painter

Movements and Styles: The Hudson River School, Tonalism, The Barbizon School, Naturalism

Born: May 1, 1825 - Newburgh, New York

Died: August 3, 1894 - Bridge of Allen, Stirling, Scotland

Table of contents

> Summary
> Key Ideas
> Artworks
> Biography & Legacy
Influences and Connections
Resources

"The purpose of the painter is simply to reproduce in other minds the impression which a scene has made upon him. A work of art does not appeal to the intellect. It does not appeal to the moral sense. Its aim is not to instruct, not to edify, but to awaken an emotion."

Summary of George Inness

George Inness's atmospheric, illustrative compositions represent a vital contribution to nineteenth-century North American landscape painting. At the same time Inness is noteworthy for his resistance to many of the generic trappings associated with that era. Whereas contemporaries such as Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church forged a distinctively American approach to the Romantic landscape, Inness was interested in exploring and turning to new effect the European Romantic origins of their work. His early works, in their soft brushwork and emphasis of light and tonal effects, suggest the proto-Impressionism of Camille Corot, and were directly influenced by the French Barbizon School. Later works take on the bold painterly effects of J.M.W. Turner. At the same time, Inness was a recalcitrant and obdurately individualistic figure, his fierceness vital in ensuring the singularity of his work. He remains a potent force in the history of modern American painting.

Key Ideas

While the pioneers of the Hudson River School struck out from European Romanticism to forge a distinctively North American brand of landscape painting, George Inness remained a committed Europhile throughout his life: a commitment which, ironically, made him amongst the most unique painters of the Hudson River generation. Whereas the artists of that school set out across the wider American continent in search of new subject-matter, George Inness - who was actually born in the Hudson Valley - sought inspiration in the classical ruins and hillsides of Italy, and the dense forests of rural France. In this sense, his work arguably registers as contribution to mid-century European Naturalism as well as the era of the classic American landscape.

George Inness's landscape paintings offer us a cultural space as much as a natural space. The vogue in nineteenth-century American painting was for vast canvases in which all human activity was excised from the scene to suggest an untamed wilderness. But Inness was more concerned with expressing the interaction of humankind with the landscapes which they made their own. In this sense, his paintings represent a uniquely optimistic view of social progress in the nineteenth century: they are monuments to a process of industrialization and urbanization that, it was felt, might bring about a new era of harmony between humanity and nature.

Throughout his life Inness remained committed to studio working, and to an idea of the landscape painting as a synthetic composition, bringing together elements of the real and the fictional, which was rejected by painters such as Frederic Edwin Church. Though Church's landscapes were as imaginative and - in a positive sense - artificial as Inness's, Inness was unique in foregoing the cult of fidelity to nature and plein air technique that defined much of the Hudson River generation.

George Inness was born in 1825 near Newburgh, in the mid-Hudson River valley. He was the fifth of thirteen children born to Clarissa and John Inness, a farmer and grocer. The family moved to Newark, New Jersey when he was five and he was encouraged to read and learn about art. His father wanted Inness to become a grocer but he had other ideas, and at the age of 14 he took up drawing lessons. His father was well-off and could provide for his son's teaching but nonetheless his early artistic education ended here. Inness was a small child and suffered from epilepsy, which he cited as the reason for his lack of a formal education. But he was reportedly inspired by one of his father's books on art, which he would read and re-read, especially fascinated by the paintings of Claude Lorrain.

George Inness's childhood, life, career, and various anecdotes

Read George Inness's Biography

And, the artists and movements that built upon George Inness's art

Read George Inness's Artistic Legacy

Important Art by George Inness The below artworks are the most important by George Inness - that both overview the major creative periods, and highlight the greatest achievements by the artist.
	The Lackawanna Valley (c. 1855) Artwork description & Analysis: This is one of George Inness's earliest pieces, produced while he was still a struggling young artist for the first president of the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad. Inness was paid $75 for the composition, which includes a mixture of pastoral and industrial elements. A picturesque scene of fields on the outskirts of Scranton, Pennsylvania is cut through with the tracks of the growing railroad. In the foreground we see stumps of trees felled to make way for progress, and the figure of a reclining man looking on at the approaching train. (The scene was in fact partially invented: Inness was aggrieved to be asked to add more tracks than existed, exaggerate the prominence of the roundhouse, and paint the company logo on the train.) Two sets of track meet in the middle, leading the eye to the steam engine and its roundhouse beyond. Beyond this, the eye is drawn to the steeple of a church, picked out in black beyond the white locomotive steam, while further afield the gentle Pennsylvanian hills are rendered in calming blues and purples. For its unique status to be appreciated this work should be compared with prominent landscape paintings of the time. Two years later Frederic Edwin Church would produce his majestic Niagara, a work which shows no human history, no industry, and no progress, merely the unfettered power of nature at work. Inness by contrast chose - or was paid - to depict human civilization in nature, and as such, the bucolic Lackawanna Valley is an ambiguous work. The scene and color palette are calm and harmonious, but the scarred tree trunks in the foreground, emerging from the earth almost like marks of disease, raise questions about the artist's message. This synthesis of natural and manmade elements predicates the work of Precisionist artists such as Charles Sheeler. The work has become one of Inness's most famous, but it went through a period of neglect. It was lost and the artist amazingly found it years later collecting dust in a curiosity shop in Mexico City. He brought it for a few dollars and gleefully brought it home. The curator Nicolai Cikovsky Jr. described it as "a great and compelling painting,...The Lackawanna Valley is a masterpiece not because of its subject, but because it is painted with such sensitivity and authority, such beauty and power." Oil on canvas - The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
	The Delaware Water Gap (c. 1857) Artwork description & Analysis: This work, like The Lackawanna Valley, depicts the emerging North-American steam train network, but the prominence of the locomotive is far more diminished. He we see the Delaware Water Gap on the border of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. In the foreground, the rocks and grasses are darkened by cloud-cover, which are luminously rendered above, predicating the effects of Tonalism. The work also hints at the effects of Impressionism; although Inness would dismiss the school on a trip to France 13 years later, this work partly comprises a delicate study of light in the style of European proto-Impressionists such as Corot. A rainbow arcs from the earth to the left of the canvas, while the drizzle and mist are rendered in glazes of white and yellow as rain falls on the Kittatinny Mountains. In the flat, tranquil water cows wallow, while figures bob on a raft beyond, up the Delaware River. Houses are picked out among the trees while a small dark train steams out of the canvas to the left. Again, we see the contrast of man and earth, nature and machine, working together in quiet harmony. Inness painted this scene more than any other subject throughout his career. Critics have suggested that for the young artist the scene presented a quintessential image of human progress. As Cikovsky stated, "[i]ts combination of natural beauty and the railroad, rafts and felled trees that exemplify human enterprise made it a pictorial type of definite meaning." In this rendering of the scene Innes broke from the carefully executed attention to detail which became associated with the Hudson River School, showing his desire to explore more painterly techniques, and the autonomous qualities of color. In retrospect, the work seems rich with the combined influences of Dutch landscape painting and the expressive brushwork of the French Barbizon school, a movement that had a huge influence on the artist. Corot was cited by Inness as one of the finest landscape artists in existence, and his influence here is clear. As the cultural historian James Thomas Flexner put it, "[h]owever American [Inness's] work would have looked in France, it looked very French in America." Oil on canvas - The National Gallery, London

	Peace and Plenty (1865) Artwork description & Analysis: Inness continued to battle the artistic norms promoted by the Hudson River School into the middle years of his career, as exemplified by this large and lush canvas. Favoring the pastoral over the grandiose, Inness renders Peace and Plenty in soft brushstrokes of copper, gold, and green, heralding the beginnings of the Tonalist movement as he carefully plays with color and composition to suggest spiritual harmony. Here we see workers setting down their tools at the end of a long day of harvesting. The fruits of their labors, sheaths of wheat tethered and piled, shine in the warm golden twilight. Inness again brings together nature and industry, with the enveloping glow of the sunset, hidden behind the central tree, uniting the different elements of the scene. The slow-moving river, the distant houses, and the blue and pink sky, all convey a sense of peace, a mood emphasized by Inness's use of enriched pigments. If works such as The Delaware Water Gap represent the influence of European mid-century landscape painting, Peace and Plenty is strikingly reminiscent of early-nineteenth-century British Romantic landscape painting; John Constable seems a particularly suitable point of reference. In terms of cultural-historical resonances, meanwhile, the work was painted towards the end of the civil war, and seems to reflect the slowly emerging mood of a nation at peace. The curator Leo Mazow offers a detailed, schematic reading of the work, suggesting that it reflects three different views of history: cyclical, millennial, and progressive. Firstly, the painting alludes to the cyclical view of history offered in Genesis, which presents alternating states of feast and famine, but it also references millennial, Swedenborgen notions of a 'New Jerusalem' or promised land that could be forged on American soil. Finally, Inness codifies a progressive view of the advent of industrialization, that he felt, in contrast to some of his Hudson River School contemporaries, might herald a new era of civility, defined by the peaceful coexistence of man and nature. Oil on canvas - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

More George Inness Artwork and Analysis:

Influences and Connections

Influences on Artist

Artists, Friends, Movements

Influenced by Artist

Artists, Friends, Movements

Interactive chart with George Inness's main influences, and the people and ideas that the artist influenced in turn.

View Influences Chart
Show influences

Artists

	Theodore Rousseau
	Claude Lorrain
	Salvator Rosa
	Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
	Charles-François Daubigny

Personal Contacts

	Régis-François Gignoux
	John Jesse Barker

Movements

	American Landscape Painting
	The Barbizon School
	Dutch Landscape Painting

Influences on Artist

George Inness

Years Worked: 1841 - 1894

Influenced by Artist

Artists

	Louis Comfort Tiffany
	Carleton Wiggins
	Joseph Decker
	William Keith

Personal Contacts

	George Inness Jr
	Jonathan Scott Hartley

Movements

Tonalism

If you see an error or typo, please:

tell us

Cite this page

Content compiled and written by Sarah Ingram

Edited and revised, with Synopsis and Key Ideas added by Greg Thomas

" Artist Overview and Analysis". [Internet]. . TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written by Sarah Ingram
Edited and revised, with Synopsis and Key Ideas added by Greg Thomas
Available from:
First published on 30 Nov 2019. Updated and modified regularly.
[Accessed ]

George Inness

Summary of George Inness

Key Ideas

Important Art by George Inness

The Lackawanna Valley (c. 1855)

The Delaware Water Gap (c. 1857)

Peace and Plenty (1865)

More George Inness Artwork and Analysis:

Influences and Connections