Biography from Pierce Galleries, Inc.:
| George Inness was born on a farm near Newburg, New York, in 1825.
The artist showed an early aptitude for drawing as he grew up in New
York City and in and around Newark, New Jersey. At the age of
thirteen he drew from reproductions provided by a sensitive
schoolteacher. He was afflicted with fits of epilepsy, a disease
people feared and misunderstood, and he was somewhat frail.
In 1839, his father discouraged his artistic talents and gave Inness a
grocery store to manage in an attempt to dissuade him from becoming a
painter. Disgruntled working with food and the public, in 1841 Inness
left home for New York City to work for Sherman and Smith as a map
engraver by day and he taught himself to paint with oils by night.
At the age of 19, Inness exhibited a canvas at the National
Academy. In 1843, Inness studied for a short period in Brooklyn
with Regis Francois Gignoux (1814-1882) who was known for snowy
landscapes and views of Niagara Falls. Inness finished an
impressive 34 ½ x 49 ¼ inch pastoral view with oxen and figures set in
an expansive New Jersey landscape titled Afternoon, 1846 (also Landscape-Afternoon) and exhibited the canvas at the 1846 American Art Union’s “Annual Exhibition” (no. 6) and possibly at the National Academy.
Historian Michael Quick (who is compiling the George Inness Catalogue Raisonné) wrote on November 9, 1999, “Afternoon
ranks as one of the most beautiful and accomplished painting of
Inness’s early period and it shows how talented a draftsman he was at
an early age. This canvas is very important to his history and to
the history of American art.” Pictures like 'Afternoon, 1846" and those painted through 1868 identify Inness with the Hudson River School.
The American Art Union helped promote Inness as a formidable landscape
painter by reproducing some of his early works and by distributing
engravings of them. In 1847, a collector paid $100 for a canvas by
Inness and became his patron. With this success, the artist went to
Europe (and again in 1854-1855) and he became enthralled when he
studied the rustic scenes of Jean-Francois Millet (1814-1875).
Millet’s ability to eliminate the unnecessary and to paint the
essential and to display with dignity melancholy views that depicted
the sad toil of common laborers inspired Inness.
He soon became a follower of the Barbizon painters and was influenced
by the works of Narcisse Virgil Diaz de la Pena (1807-1876), Theodore
Rousseau (1812-1867) and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875).
After 1854, his paintings start to interpret the best artistic
techniques of the Barbizon tradition, learning to paint outdoors in the
Forest of Fontainbleau. He dissolved hard outlines into a play of
color and atmosphere.
When he returned to America, he lived and painted in Medfield,
Massachusetts, and he began painting intimate landscapes that utilized
broad masses of light and shadow, subtle color harmonies and less
emphasis on the picturesque. From 1870-1874, Inness lived in
Italy and painted in the Campagna, Florence, the Alban Hills south of
Rome and in France. He began to mute detail and fill canvases
with a pervading tonal light and he sought to capture the spirit of
nature as it mysteriously changed within atmospheric hazes, mists and
natural light. Falling under the spell of Swedenborgian
mysticism, by 1878, Inness was a spiritualist whose brushwork became
more poetical, lyrical and sensuous as his subjects crept into an
almost corporeal space.
Inness’s paintings go from being somber, moody and glaze toned to those
that take on hints of Impressionism (although Inness did not like that
tradition) and blend into the enigmatical or obscure, hidden elements
of nature. The artist transformed the luminous romantic realism
of the Hudson River tradition into dreamlike expressions of nature that
dissolve or fuse lines into atmospheric, pervasive, freely handled
naturalism that is expressed uniquely.
Being subjective, Inness observed fact and slowly built up and
structured through layers of impasto atmospheres and transcendent
visions of nature. Because of this, he is considered one of America’s
most talented and gifted landscapists. He said he wanted art to awaken
emotions in people. He did not think a painting should have the
purpose of appealing to the intellect or the moral senses, and for
certain they were not to instruct or teach. His were expressions of
American tonalism -- of the colors of moods. Inness said, “The
true purpose of a painter is to reproduce in other minds the impression
which the scene made on him.” (Quoted from James Thomas Flexner, History of American Painting, NY: Dover Publications, 1962, p. 261).
In 1853, Inness became a member of the National Academy (NY). Although
he exhibited in clubs, he joined no others, perhaps because he was more
an egotist and did not lend a consistent or available humble,
sympathetic ear. At one moment he could be friendly, helpful and
cheerful of painters and the next moment he could be a volatile,
critical, snobby, know-it all who could not bare the presence of
artists who had lesser reputations than his own. Although he had
wealthy patrons, if one offended him he was known to arrogantly reject
their offers of vast amounts of money for canvases and discard them as
fools. One of his finest, most prestigious friends was also his
patron and agent Thomas B. Clarke (1848-1931), who helped sponsor and
support for years the grumpy talented artist.
During the 1890s, Inness became so despondent and artistically
confused, he repainted over and over again aspects of his
canvases. He rejected science as inferior to art and thought
Impressionism produced mere reproductions of nature. As he
struggled to paint what he thought should be coming from him, he rarely
was satisfied, and critics across the country criticized him for
redoing aspects of canvases until they were ugly. Because he
believed his artistic emotions were of divine origin perhaps he thought
nothing he painted was good enough and that was one reason why he
repainted canvas after canvas, hoping to find perfection.
After telling a Boston Evening Transcript reporter in 1876
that he wanted to go out West, Inness and his wife Elizabeth finally
went to California in 1890. They stayed at Hotel Del Coronado in
San Diego before traveling to Pasadena and then to San Francisco to be
with painter William Keith (who was also Barbizon-inspired and often
compared with or accused of being Inness influenced). On March
21, 1890, Keith and Inness stayed at the once-luxurious Hotel Del Monte
in Monterey and the Monterey Cypress called Keith “the celebrated
scenic painter” and Inness “one of the best landscape painters in the
world.” Inness and Keith painted in the groves and along the
rolling seaside cliffs at Monterey, but Inness painted oaks instead of
cypress, kept within the confines of the dramatic Barbizon aesthetic
and reworked paintings in Keith’s studio, trying to capture the emotion
of the landscape.
Before he left California, the overconfident Inness insulted Keith by
stating that Yosemite had never been painted well and that he would
show the world someone could paint it. Not only had Keith painted
Yosemite beautifully, so had Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Hill and many
others, but Inness disregarded them as incompetent when he made that
statement. After Inness attempted to capture the essence of
Yosemite, he went back to Keith’s studio and admitted he could not
paint it. When Inness left California, he offended the talented
Keith once again by gifting him his palette, which Keith in turn gifted
to a poverty-stricken artist. The two men remained friends, and Keith
admitted he had been highly influenced by Inness’s visit and so had
many other California painters. It is not known if Inness ever
completed a masterfully handled oil painting or sketch of Yosemite.
None are known today.
Landscape painter George Inness, Jr. (1854-1926) often painted with his
father and sometimes the duo worked on the same canvases after
1890. George Inness, Jr. often became frustrated when the Senior
Inness attempted to be instructive and helpful because his father often
reworked his canvases until he eliminated major aspects of them. Inness
died in Bridge of Allan, Scotland in 1894 an internationally recognized
landscape painter of esteem. His estate auction was held at the
Union League Club in New York City where one of his Monterey paintings
California sold for twelve thousand dollars.
Inness is represented in the permanent collections at the Museum of
Fine Art (Boston); Metropolitan Museum of Art; National Museum of
American Art; Art Institute of Chicago (20 works); New York Historical
Society; Brooklyn Museum of Art; Canajorharie Art Gallery; Cincinnati
Art Museum; Carnegie Art Institute; Dallas Museum of Art; Davenport
Museum of Art; Arizona State Univ. Art Museum; Arizona Museum of Art;
Fogg Art Museum; NAD; PAFA; Newark Art Museum; N.C. Museum of Art; Mead
Art Gallery; Indianapolis Museum of Art; The White House; Yale
University Art Gallery; New Orleans Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of
American Art; Montclair Art Museum; Santa Barbara Museum of Art;
Phoenix Art Museum; Wadsworth Athenaeum; High Museum of Art; Davenport
Museum of Art; Toledo Ar Museum; Gilcrease Museum, Stark Museum of Art
and more.
Bibliography:
Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., The Life and Work of George Inness (NY: Garland Pub. Co., 1977)
Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr. and Michael Quick, George Inness (CA: L.A. County Museum of Art, 1985)
George Inness, Jr., The Life, Art and Letters of George Inness (NY: 1917)
Leroy Ireland, The Works of George Inness: An Illustrated Catalogue Raisonné (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1965)
Elizabeth MCCausland, George Inness, An American Landscape Painter (Springfield, MA, 1946);
Majorie Dakin Arkelian & George Neubert, George Inness Landscapes: His Signature Years, 1884-1894 (CA: Oakland Museum, 1978)
And articles “George Inness, The Artist, the Scholar, and the Man,” Collector,
October 1894; Art Interchange, September 1894; Alfred C. Harrison, Jr.,
“George Inness and the San Francisco Art World in the 1890s,” Antiques, November 2000.
Submitted by historian Patricia Jobe Pierce |
Biography from MB Fine Art, LLC:
| Born in Newburgh, New York, in 1825, George Inness was raised in New
York City and Newark, New Jersey. His early life was disrupted by
severe illness, and he had as a result little formal academic or
artistic education. In Newark, he studied with the itinerant
painter John Jesse Barker, and in New York, probably in 1843, with the
French-born landscape painter, Regis Francois Gignoux
Inness visited Italy in 1850. In 1853 he visited France, where he
studied French Barbizon landscape painting, admiring especially the
work of the most radical of the Barbizon artists, Theodore
Rousseau. This was, in the influence on his style, the most
decisive experience of Inness' artistic life.
In the early 1860s Inness moved from New York to Medfield,
Massachusetts. In 1864, he moved to Eagleswood, New Jersey. At
Eagleswood, he was introduced to the teaching of Emanuel
Swedenborg. It became his religious faith, and determined, too,
the increasingly allusive, expressive, and almost mystical character of
his later art
Inness lived in Italy from 1870 to 1874 and in France briefly in 1875,
when he returned to America. In 1876 he settled in Montclair, New
Jersey. He lived in Montclair for the rest of his life, but
traveled widely, often for the sake of his health, to Niagara Falls,
Virginia, California, and Tarpon Springs, Florida.
He died on a trip to Scotland in 1894. |
Biography from William A. Karges Fine Art - Beverly Hills:
| George Inness is remembered as a giant in American Art. He was born in Newark, New Jersey, where he showed an early art talent that was not encouraged by his father. Regardless, Inness would become, with virtually no art training, a member of the National Academy in 1868.
Inness traveled extensively during his life, and in 1891 he shared a studio in San Francisco with William Keith. Works from this trip included Yosemite and Monterey Peninsula paintings. Innes eschewed the overly dramatic style of the Hudson River school painters, and instead focused on a light infused tonalism that, like Keith’s works, relied on glazes for his desired effects. |
Biography from AskART:
| "George Inness and the Visionary Landscape" at the National Academy of Design
Submitted By RAYMOND J. STEINER and written for ART TIMES October 2003
AS
WITH ANY artist worthy of the title, George Inness (18251894) 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.
A major break with his early Hudson
River School tendencies was to paint a nature less untamed, less raw
than that of Cole's, Albert Bierstadt's (1830-1902) or Church's
America. Inness felt a need to show more human interaction with nature,
a symbiotic relationship that would deepen into mystical significance
when, in the 1860's, he came under the influence of Emanuel
Swedenborg's (1688-1772) theosophical teachings especially that of his
belief in the unity of God, Nature and Man. Thomas Cole, the "father"
of the Hudson River School, and his followers also attempted to show
the hand of God in Nature, but it was a Divine Presence that revealed
itself in sublime grandiosity rather than in any subtle and intimate
connection with man. This was unacceptable to Inness who began to see
Nature as the vital and mystical link between man and his Creator. At
first, his early canvases merely showed man's ingress into his natural
surroundings: a farmhouse, cleared forestlands, or plowed fields.
In
opposition to his Hudson River School contemporaries, he wanted to
paint what he called "civilized" landscapes that showed both God's and
man's hand working in tandem. Later canvases would become less
explicit, more amorphous, painted in a free style that would sometimes
be called "poetic" by his fellows. When human figures did appear they
were only suggested, depicted as integral parts of nature rather than
as intruders. Who the figures were was less important than that they
showed their belongingness their oneness with the landscape. It appears
as if by making the figures "featureless" it would help him to blend
them more easily into the inchoate swirl of Nature.)
Much has
been written about Inness' Swedenborgian mysticism a great deal, in
fact, by the painter himself leaving many with the impression of an
introspective, ethereal man who mooned around the countryside. Yet, as
Nicolai Cikovsky once wrote in an essay entitled "George Inness: Sense
of Sensibility," Inness "smoked cigars, drank (sometimes even to
excess), swore, and struggled to control his 'carnal lusts' and
'sensual appetites."**
He was, in short, a man completely
equipped (and handicapped) with all that that term implies. As
"mystical" as you may feel that a belief in the unity between God, Man
and Nature is, Inness was far from some dreamy-eyed follower of the
latest fad. Transcendentalism might have caught up the period's best
minds (cf., e.g., Inness' contemporaries Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803-1882), Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) and their fellow Brahmins
in New England) and the teachings of Swedenborg might have been right
up their alley, but Inness appears to have accepted little at face
value especially when it came to his painting. If he eschewed the
finicky detail so dear to the Hudson River School, he was equally
disdainful of Impressionism with its ever-threatening impulse to lose
detail altogether.
He wanted to paint landscapes that were
neither literal transcriptions nor indistinguishable blobs of color.
What he strove for were paintings that avoided "thought alone or of
feeling alone" and attempted to produce canvases that revealed a
combination of "will and understanding" (from a letter by Inness to
Ripley Hitchcock dated March 23, 1884). Stated otherwise, his vaunted
mysticism never quite overshadowed his logical faculties. Perhaps more
important than what he learned from the Barbizons insofar as painting
landscapes was concerned, was his absorption of French rationality
their ability to combine thought and feeling, allowing the "opposites"
to temper each other.
Inness' real soul-mates in painting
God-filled (God-suggesting might better fit his stated intent)
landscapes are perhaps to be found neither in France nor America but in
Germany, in such 18th/19th century romantics as Philipp Otto Runge
(1777-1810) and Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840). Although there is
little similarity between Inness' and Runge's landscapes, that German
artist's belief in the unity of God, Man and Nature and especially his
color theories wherein he ascribes to each hue a symbolic significance,
might have afforded both artists many hours of fruitful conversation.
Inness himself often expounded on his own color theories to his
students and, in essence, they did not markedly differ from those of
Runge. With Friedrich on the other hand, it is when we compare their
paintings that we discover common ground few would question the
attribution of Friedrich's name, for instance, to Inness' "Christmas
Eve" (1866), a dark, moody and foreboding picture that could well have
flowed from the great German Romantic's brush.
Another
similarity the two artists share was their propensity to show only the
backs of figures as they melded into the landscape, both artists
emphasizing man's essential oneness with Nature rather than his
personal distinction from Her. Even more telling, however, is
Friedrich's purposeful disregard for linear persepctive, obfuscating
distance much as did Inness, and his non-naturalistic handling of
color, again, a common practice of Inness.
Recollections of
Inness and comparisons of his work with others notwithstanding no
matter how factual or relevant the artist must ultimately be understood
and judged by the body of work left behind. The present exhibition
handsomely presented and hung in several galleries offers an
opportunity to do just that. It was as a painter (and not as a
spiritual theorist), however, that Inness built his reputation and it
was his preferred medium of expression. Over and above anything else,
what is expressed is his love or rather his reverence for Nature.
Whatever
the style and the exhibition covers the whole range of his career, from
the 1850's to the 1890's one is struck by his struggle to capture the
essence of what Nature meant to him. If his brushstroke remains
unremarkable (no overuse of heavily laid-on impasto though used to good
effect in "Moonrise" (1888) no flourishing signature), one gradually
sees a loosening of the wrist, a studied attempt to suggest rather than
to delineate in short, a conscious move to be a painter rather than a
draftsman. He claimed not to want to paint the "hieroglyphs" of Nature
but to attempt a depiction of its impact on his (our) senses. It had to
be "real" enough to recognize as landscape, yet "vague" enough to
suggest its Divine source. In his words,
"When John saw the
vision of the Apocalypse, he saw it. He did not see emasculation, or
weakness, or gaseous representation. He saw things, and those things
represented an idea." So much for the airy-fairy. He wanted his
landscapes to be seen as landscapes yet understood as Divine
revelations. For this viewer, he pulled it off most of the time. It is
difficult not to experience the quiet majesty of such paintings as
"Hackensack Meadows, Sunset" (1859) or The Huntsman (1859) or Summer, Montclair (New Jersey Landscape) (1891). Pictures such as
Sunset Glow (1883), The Home of the Heron (1893), and Sunset at
Montclair (1892) his so-called "Tonalist" paintings are, for me, less
convincing as manifestations of the Divine than they are as examples of
mood pieces, reflective more of man i.e., George Inness than of God.
One
of the ironies, it seems to me, is that if Inness was attempting to
show his viewers the essential link between man and nature that he did
so less with his "visionary" paintings what we might term his
"inscapes" than he did with his more straightforward renditions of the
American landscape. For this viewer, the less accessible a picture is
i.e. indistinct the less I am able to be drawn into its "message" thus,
if I am meant to see myself as part of the trinity of God, man and
Nature, I am effectively shut out by a so-called Inness "visionary"
painting. At no time, however, do I experience a false note, a
dishonesty in Inness' attempts at sharing his vision not even in his
somewhat "stagy" dramas of orange sunsets (though I would make an
exception with the cloyingly histrionic The Valley of the Shadow of
Death (1867)). Inness had a supreme sense of composition and an
uncanny ability to render aerial perspective. His "atmospheres" can
often seem actually moisture-laden, tangibly "there." And though he
sometimes played fast and loose with local color (undoubtedly part of
his color theory), somehow the very unreality of the hues lends them a
truth that escapes logic.
Yet, total reliance on the pictures as
avenues of access to the artist can also be dangerous. As Cikovsky
points out in the essay quoted above, too many have taken the
unfinished late paintings found in his studio as mature and finished
products, basing unfounded assumptions and deductions on them. Although
many of these might fit one's pre-conceived conception of Inness as a
spiritualist or, God forbid!, even a pre-cursor of modernist
abstraction one cannot fairly make judgments on unfinished canvases.
This is especially true of a painter like Inness who deemed
"unfinished" many canvases that he did allow to leave his studio, at
times tracking them down into buyer's houses to make additional changes
and additions. An inveterate tinkerer, he felt no qualms about
"touching up" the canvases of students and colleagues as well as those
of his own, convinced that a few extra dabs and scumbles would improve
them. When we recall his disdain of paintings that he called
"intellectual dishwater" or "gaseous representation," we can well
imagine his assessment of his own unfinished canvases and what he may
think of those who claim them as his "mature" work.
But there
are enough paintings here to make your own judgments. At bottom,
whether or not you find God in Inness' paintings will depend on whether
or not you can find Him (or Her) in yourself.
*George Inness
and the Visionary Landscape (thru Dec 28): National Academy of Design
Museum, 1083 Fifth Ave. at 89th St., NYC (212) 369-4880. A catalogue of
the same name by Adrienne Baxter Bell, and published by George
Braziller, Inc. is available:
**(See
catalogue for George Inness: Presence of the Unseen (A Centennial
Commemoration): The Hudson River Museum of Westchester, Summer of 1995. |
Biography from AskART:
| Born on a farm near Newburgh, New York, George Inness had post-Civil
War recognition for paintings that were unique in structure and
atmosphere and that turned away from the dramatic, panoramic Hudson
River School of painting to a quieter, tonalist expression of poetry in
nature. Among the Americans at Barbizon, France, he was the
leading painter of that movement of early plein-air landscape painters.
He
spent his youth in Newark, New Jersey. His father, trying to
discourage his obvious art talent, gave him at age 14 a grocery store
to run. But in 1841, at age 16, George left for New York and
worked for a map engraver. Impatient with supervision, he started
to paint alone and exhibited with the National Academy in 1844.
He studied briefly in Brooklyn with Regis Gignoux,a French academic
painter, and then went to Europe, something he continued to do often
including two trips to Italy and France in the 1850s that much
influenced his work.
In 1868, he was elected to the National
Academy of Design in New York, and in 1891, was in Northern California
where he shared a studio with William Keith and painted with him in
Yosemite and Monterey. He and Keith also shared a commitment to
the philosophy of Swedenborg. In 1892 and 1893, Inness and his
wife traveled in Florida where he painted numerous landscapes.
His
painting technique was elaborate. He swiftly stained the surfaces
of his canvases, and then sketched on them with charcoal and umber, a
process that sometimes took more than a week. He used opaque
paint to bring out light and texture and then used glaze to tone it
down. The overall result were landscapes that combined tonalism
and luminism, great contrast of light and dark.
Much of his life
he was poor, and he also had chronic bouts of epilepsy, but in the
later part of his life and posthumously, he earned a reputation as one
of America's most talented painters.
Sources:
Michael David Zellman, 300 Years of American Art
Edan Hughes, Artists in California, 1786-1940
Matthew Baigell, Dictionary of American Art
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| ** If you discover credit omissions or have additional information to add, please let us know at registrar@AskART.com. |
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