American Luminist Landscape
Signed lower right
OIl on Canvas
Overall Size: 24x20 inches Sight Size: 17.5x13.5 inches
George Inness (1825-1894) is not easily summed up. Often associated with the Hudson River School, he was, in fact, aesthetically in opposition to the large, detailed canvases which characterized the work of such painters as Thomas Cole (1801-1848) and Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900), two major representative painters of that group. Others see him as a transplanted member of the French Barbizon School, more in tune with their less grandiose, more intimate landscapes of homely, domesticated scenes of rural France. Still others as the title of this exhibition* indicates see him as a visionary theorist, painting dreamy landscapes fraught with symbolic messages and meanings. And, like any artist, these and many other attempts at pigeonholing might well fit part of the man and his work.

However, few serious artists few persons for that matter are simple creatures, one-dimensional beings whose creative output reflect one vision, one style, one statement. The current exhibition of approximately 40 of Inness' paintings at the National Academy of Design Museum in New York City offers an opportunity to reassess both the man and his work.

In spite of the emphasis on his "visionary" propensities that this exhibition sets forth, by all accounts George Inness was a man of many faces. Hailed by his contemporaries as the greatest landscape painter of his time, his colleagues and peers seem generally to have nothing but high praise for him and there were in fact a great many moved to record their opinions for posterity. Although generally laudatory, even a casual glance would reveal no one-sided view of Inness. Complex, deeply spiritual, dedicated to his chosen life as a painter, Inness was still worldly enough to enjoy his status as America's "greatest" painter of landscapes and to know how to further his career. Obviously respected as both painter and teacher, one is yet left with an elusive portrait of the man behind the public persona.

Although often characterized as self-taught, George Inness cultivated his natural talents for depiction by close observation and careful study of the masters his contemporaries as well as those from the past. An inherent love of nature seems to have automatically drawn him to landscape painting and, indeed, if the few figures, which appear in the present exhibition, are any indication, the depiction of the human form was not his forte. Though we may attribute this to some intentional purpose connected with his "spiritual" predilections, when included they are summarily sketched in, seldom given the same amount of attention to detail as found, say, in his renditions of trees, or fields, or bodies of water. Though, a "people person" to his students and colleagues, Inness, at least when it came to his art, appears to have felt much more at home when dealing with the non-human elements of nature.

At first attracted to and influenced by the Hudson River School of artists (a fact borne out by his early work), he soon found their over-blown, generalized views of the American landscape foreign to his own bent. A study-trip to Europe where he could view the masters at first hand and especially to see the work of the small band of landscape artists summering at Barbizon opened a way for him to make a more personal statement about landscape. Particularly impressed with the work of Jean Corot (1796-1875) and Theodore Rousseau (1812-1867), his paintings became less detailed, with deliberately loose brushstrokes and chiaroscuro blurring clear demarcations of distance, making it difficult to distinguish between foreground and background, sky and horizon, in his paintings.