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The essential book on the innovative American landscape...)
The essential book on the innovative American landscape painter, with a new preface by the author. A “rare, valuable and luminously illustrated monograph.” (Booklist)
This eloquent examination of Inness' most important paintings illuminates the artist’s philosophical and religious preoccupations. It provides an overview of his life and situates Inness within the contexts of key issues in American history, such as the Hudson River School, Transcendentalism, Swedenborgianism, and the work of William James. It explains for the first time how Inness treated landscape painting as a form of philosophical inquiry that could communicate his holistic belief in the unity of nature and spirit. “Bell’s handsomely illustrated, eloquently written, and well-documented text considerably expands previous scholarship. ..A first-rate study. Highly recommended.” (Choice)
40 full color illustrations and 19 black and white illustrations
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George Inness (1825-94), long considered one of America...)
George Inness (1825-94), long considered one of America's greatest landscape painters, has yet to receive his full due from scholars and critics. A complicated artist and thinker, Inness painted stunningly beautiful, evocative views of the American countryside. Less interested in representing the details of a particular place than in rendering the "subjective mystery of nature," Inness believed that capturing the spirit or essence of a natural scene could point to a reality beyond the physical or, as Inness put it, "the reality of the unseen."
Throughout his career, Inness struggled to make visible what was invisible to the human eye by combining a deep interest in nineteenth-century scientific inquiry—including optics, psychology, physiology, and mathematics—with an idiosyncratic brand of mysticism. Rachael Ziady DeLue's George Inness and the Science of Landscape—the first in-depth examination of Inness's career to appear in several decades—demonstrates how the artistic, spiritual, and scientific aspects of Inness's art found expression in his masterful landscapes. In fact, Inness's practice was not merely shaped by his preoccupation with the nature and limits of human perception; he conceived of his labor as a science in its own right.
This lavishly illustrated work reveals Inness as profoundly invested in the science and philosophy of his time and illuminates the complex manner in which the fields of art and science intersected in nineteenth-century America. Long-awaited, this reevaluation of one of the major figures of nineteenth-century American art will prove to be a seminal text in the fields of art history and American studies.
George Inness was a prominent American landscape painter and georgist activist. He became the leading American exponent of Barbizon-style painting, which he developed into a highly personal style.
Background
George Inness was born on May 1, 1825 in Newburgh, New York, United States. He was the fifth of a family of thirteen children.
His father, John William Inness (1792 - 1873), was of Scotch descent, but was born in America, his forebears having crossed the Atlantic soon after the American Revolution. He was an energetic and prosperous New York merchant, who, having made a competence in the grocery business, retired temporarily for recreation and rest. His mother, Clarissa Baldwin, died in 1841, a year and a day after the birth of her thirteenth child.
George Inness was a delicate child of a nervous temperament, but strong of will and full of ambition. The family returned to New York City while he was still an infant; but very soon, in 1829, removed to another country home in the outskirts of Newark, New Jersey, where his boyhood was passed.
Education
His progress at school was often interrupted by ill health; moreover his teacher reported that he "would not take education. " His father then tried to make a grocer of him, but with no success, and the experiment was given up after a month's trial. Finally the boy urged his father to allow him to study drawing, and accordingly he was placed under the instruction of one Barker, who shortly declared that he had taught him all he knew.
Later, he became the pupil of Régis Gignoux, a French landscapist who had set up a studio in New York. This was the only technical training in painting that he ever had.
Career
At the age of sixteen George entered the employ of Sherman & Smith, map engravers, in New York, where he remained about a year.
About 1845 he took a studio for himself and began his professional career. He boarded at the Astor House and paid for his board in pictures. He had already done some sketching from nature at Pottsville, Pennsylvania, where his elder brother James lived. Beyond doubt, however, his early productions were crude. His first exhibition picture, "Afternoon, " painted in 1846, and shown at the Art Union, was tight and niggling, with a little of everything in the composition - woods and hills, fields and pastures, trees and stream, cattle and sheep, horse and rider, red barn and bridge - yet it had an air of rustic actuality.
One of the young painter's first patrons was Ogden Haggerty, an auctioneer, who bought several of his pictures and supplied him with money for his first trip abroad in 1847. Inness went to Italy, and spent a year there, painting in the vicinity of Rome.
In Medfield Inness painted some of his most famous and beautiful canvases in an old barn which he had converted into a studio. Among the most frequent visitors at this period were Mark Fisher, George N. Cass, and J. A. S. Monks, ardent admirers and disciples of Inness.
After the close of the Civil War Inness was induced to go to Eagleswood, New Jersey, by Marcus Spring, a friend who constituted himself the artist's business agent and sales manager. In 1871 Inness made a journey abroad, and he stayed four years, most of the time in or near Rome. After his return he spent one year in Boston, then he went to New York and took a studio in West Fifty-fifth Street. Finally, in 1878, he removed to an old house in Montclair, New Jersey, where the rest of his life was passed happily, with occasional intervals of travel to Florida, California, Virginia, Nantucket, and elsewhere.
Up to 1875, at which time he was fifty years old, the sale of his works had brought him no adequate income. But in the seventies a valiant guardian angel came upon the scene in the person of Thomas B. Clarke, who bought thirty-five land-scapes and set a fashion that was soon followed by other rich collectors--Seney, Halsted, Ellsworth, and many more. Then Inness' income became larger than that of any landscape painter living.
He died of heart disease at Bridge of Allan, Scotland, while traveling, August 3, 1894.
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The essential book on the innovative American landscape...)
Religion
Beginning as a Baptist, he went over to Methodism, and at last became a Swedenborgian.
Views
His early work had some of the earmarks of the Hudson River school; that is to say, it was scenic and literal, with minute detail elaborated at the expense of unity and breadth. But as soon as he became acquainted with the work of the men of 1830 in France, as soon as his own study of nature taught him the pictorial value of suggestion as opposed to objective realism, his style underwent a steady development in the direction of lyricism and individuality. He gave expression to his strong feeling for the poetic side of landscape, for the subtle beauties of tone and of light, the harmonies due to atmospheric conditions, and above all to the rich, full, throbbing life of the earth and sky. The intensity of his temperament made itself more and more manifest in his late work; his magnificent ardor lent to his canvases an almost magical power and charm which defy all analysis.
Quotations:
In a published interview, Inness maintained that "The true use of art is, first, to cultivate the artist's own spiritual nature. "
Membership
In 1853 Inness was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member and became a full Academician in 1868.
Personality
Inness was always a mystic and he loved metaphysical speculation.
He was, says Van Dyke, supertemperamental even for an artist. His personal appearance bore out these psychological qualities. He looked like a fanatic. With his piercing gaze, his long hair, the intensity of his expression, and the nervous energy that marked his action, he was a formidable personage.
He had been blissfully indifferent to money.
Interests
His three hobbies were art, religion, and the single tax.
Artists
The work of Rousseau, Corot, and Daubigny made a deep and lasting impression upon Inness.
Connections
Inness married Delia Miller of Newark. She died about six months later.
In 1850 he married Elizabeth Hart of New York. She was then seventeen, and he was twenty-five. In 1851 they went to Italy in a sailing vessel, and remained there two years. Their first child was born in Florence. They returned in 1852, lived for a while in Brooklyn, then made another visit to Europe in 1854, going this time to France, and lodging in the Latin Quarter of Paris, where their son George was born. Three more children were born.