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.
Accomplishments
- 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.
Biography of George Inness
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.
