George Inness

George Inness distinguished himself among the Hudson River School painters by pursuing a modern aesthetic of landscape painting. A master of light and atmosphere, Inness was considered the leading American artist-philosopher of his generation. His innovative brilliance set him apart from his contemporaries and brought him great acclaim throughout his lifetime and beyond.

Inness was born in 1825, in Newburgh, New York. He came of age during the formation of the Hudson River School, a group of New York-based landscape artists who believed in creating realistic canvases of nature’s vastness. Although influenced by Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand, George Inness pursed an entirely different path as a landscape painter.

Inness’s personal and aesthetic philosophy was shaped by his travels to Europe. The works of Titian guided Inness’s style to a painterly direction. Paintings by Barbizon artists, which he encountered at stop in Paris, inspired Inness’s intimate and poetic approach to landscape painting. It was Swedish philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg’s ideas about the spiritual world and the connection between the natural and the divine that had the most profound impact on his work.

The artist’s painting philosophy incorporated atmospheric climate and expression which brings deeper spiritual meaning to his compositions. Inness felt that ‘paintings were not necessarily pictures, and it was the artist’s, even his obligation, by an aesthetic and expressive reorganisation, to interpret nature and not merely depict it.’

In his later career, Inness was able to achieve a complete synthesis of his innovative formal means and his goal of poetic expression. The central component of this synthesis was colour, which he described as ‘the soul of a painting’. Forms, on the other hand, though still based in the observation of nature, were softened by atmosphere and dissolved by light. Inness relished in capturing the colours of dawn, dusk, twilight, moonlight, the colours of all seasons and of all hours of the day.

George Inness died in 1984, at the age of 69. Throughout his career, Inness created over 1,150 paintings, watercolours and sketches throughout his career — an enduring testament to his lifelong dedication to landscape painting.