^
Died on 03 August 1894: George
Innes I, US Hudson
River School painter, specialized in Landscapes,
born on 01 May 1825.
— George Inness, born near Newburgh, New York, was the fifth of thirteen
children. His father, a prosperous grocer, tried to make a grocer out of
him, but the youth decided instead to become an artist. About 1841, he received
a month's instruction from John Jesse Barker, a painter living in Newark,
New Jersey, where the Inness family had moved in 1829. From the age of sixteen,
Inness served a two-year apprenticeship as an engraver with the New York
mapmaking firm of Sherman and Smith. He took some instruction in painting
from Régis
Gignoux [1816-1882] about 1843, around the time he was studying and
being influenced by prints of the paintings of Claude Lorrain and the seventeenth-century
Dutch landscape masters. He was also seeing the work of the leading Hudson
River School painters - particularly that of Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand
- whose style is recalled in some of his early canvases.
Inness exhibited for the first time at the
National Academy of Design in 1844 and continued to exhibit there almost
every year until the end of his life. Though he was elected an Associate
of the Academy in 1853, he was not made an Academician until 1868. He was
one of the important early members of the Society of American Artists, an
exhibition organization founded in 1877 to challenge the conservative policies
of the Academy.
By the late 1840s, Inness was exhibiting
regularly in New York and had attracted a patron, Ogden Haggerty. Inness
married Elizabeth Hart in 1850, and the following February the couple departed
for a fifteen-month stay in Italy made possible by Haggerry's financial
support. On their way home, they stopped in Paris, where Inness visited
an exhibition that included work by the Barbizon painter Théodore Rousseau;
after a second trip abroad, in 1853-54, the work of Rousseau and other Barbizon
painters exerted a strong influence on Inness's art.
Inness and his family left New York in 1860,
moving first to Medfield, Massachusetts, and later to an estate near Perth
Amboy, New Jersey. In the early 1860s, fellow artist William Page introduced
Inness to the theories of Emanuel Swedenborg, which made a deep and lasting
impression on him; indeed, became a major force in his intellectual life.
Throughout that decade, spent in rural surroundings, he sought to make his
paintings convey the profound spiritual meaning he felt the landscape around
him possessed.
In 1870, the Innesses moved to Italy for four
years, during which time the artist sent back paintings to be sold by the
Boston dealers Williams and Everett, receiving in exchange regular monthly
payments. Stopping again in Paris on the way back to the United States,
in 1874, Inness first saw works by the Impressionists
in an exhibition he visited, but he thought little of that new style of
painting.
In 1878, Inness's fortunes improved when
Thomas B. Clarke, a prominent New York art dealer, became his agent. He
took a studio in the New York University Building and bought a house and
studio in Montclair, New Jersey. His theories on painting were published
in Harper's New Monthly Magazine in 1878 and 1882; in 1882, Charles
De Kay, under the pseudonym Henry Eckford, wrote an important critical article
about his work. Two years later, a major exhibition of Inness's work was
sponsored by John E Sutton, proprietor of the American Art Association,
from which the artist emerged as the leading light in American landscape
painting, an eminent position he enjoyed for the rest of his career. During
the last years of his life, he spent summers traveling and painting in Connecticut,
New York, Massachusetts, Virginia, California, and Florida. He and his wife
returned to Europe in 1894, when Inness once again visited Paris, as well
as Baden-Baden and Munich. On his way home, he died of a stroke in the Bridge
of Allan, a small Scottish resort village. On 23 August 1894, the National
Academy of Design held an impressive funeral service for Inness, who was
by then one of its most illustrious members."
— Louis
Comfort Tiffany [1848-1933] was a student of Inness.
— George Inness, one of the most prominent figures in US art of the
19th century, is best-known today for his poetic and highly expressive approach
to landscape painting. He was born in Newburgh, New York, in 1825, the son
of a local grocer. While still a youth, he decided to pursue a career as
an artist. He initiated his studies during the 1840s, working briefly under
John Jesse Barker in Newark, New Jersey. At some point between 1843 and
1845 he was taught by the French-born landscapist, Regis Gignoux, in New
York City. During this period, he also spent two years as an apprentice
engraver with the New York firm of Sherman and Smith.
Inness began exhibiting his pictures at the
National Academy of Design in 1844. His early work, in its emphasis on detail
and topographical accuracy, reveals the influence of the prevailing Hudson
River School aesthetic as exemplified by such painters as Asher B. Durand.
However after making trips to Italy (1851-1852) and France (1853-1854),
he became deeply influenced by the serene, broadly-painted landscapes of
Rousseau, Troyen, Daubigny and other members of the French Barbizon School.
In 1860, for reasons of health as well as
discouragement with what he felt to be a lack of recognition from local
critics and patrons, Inness moved with his family to Medfield, Massachusetts.
He remained there for four years and then settled at Eagleswood, an estate
near Perth Amboy, New Jersey. It was around this time that he met the painter
William Page, who introduced him to the spiritual teachings of the Swedish
philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg. Throughout the 1860s, Inness gradually began
to abandon many of the precepts associated with the Hudson River style,
turning instead to a greater emphasis on mood and poetic effect through
the use of rich color and fluid brushwork. One of his major points of divergence
involved his vision or concept of the US landscape itself; while the Hudson
River painters focused on the untamed wilderness, Inness was drawn to what
he once described as the "civilized landscape," where nature was shaped
to suit the needs of mankind, a combination of both the real and the ideal.
In 1870, Inness made another trip to Europe,
spending most of his time in Rome. Returning to the United States four years
later, he spent a year in Boston before moving back to New York in 1875.
In 1878, he bought a home and studio in Montclair, New Jersey, where he
would live for the rest of his life. During that same year, he helped to
found the Society of American Artists, a group of younger, European influenced
artists dissatisfied with the conservative, insular attitude prevailing
at the National Academy. In 1882, Inness's work was the subject of a major
article by the New York critic Charles De Kay in Century Magazine.
Two years later, a comprehensive exhibition of his pictures at the American
Art Galleries helped further to strengthen his growing reputation.
Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, Inness's
art moved towards a greater level of individual expression. He continued
to explore various aspects of both style and theory, always turning to color
for its emotive potential. He also began to incorporate one, sometimes,
two figures into his compositions, evident in such works as The Monk
(1873). Inness produced his most original and his most visionary work during
the last decade of his life. In paintings such as Sunrise, he explored
mood and feeling through color, diffused light and a limited number of softly
defined forms. Many of his pictures from this period are depictions of forest
interiors at dawn or twilight. Although the hazy atmospheric qualities and
ethereal nature of Inness's late work has led to comparisons with Impressionism
(a movement which did inform his work to some extent), his concept of nature--spiritual,
subjective (and thus very modern) — took him well beyond Impressionism's
material and scientific concerns. Indeed, in his emphasis on emotion, his
free handling of pigment and in his quiet, harmonious compositions, he was
tremendously influential for a younger generation of painters, such as Henry
Ward Ranger and Dwight Tryon, whose related aesthetic concerns have since
been defined as Tonalism.
During his later years, Inness painted in
New York, New Jersey and Connecticut as well as in California and Florida.
He traveled to Europe in 1894, visiting Paris, Munich, and Baden. He died
in Bridge-of-Allan in Scotland that same year.
— Photo
of Innes
— LINKS
— The
Coming Storm Oil (41x61cm) — St.
Andrews, New Brunswick (1893, 83x108cm)
— Landscape
(1848, 75x113cm) _ detail
river and bridge _ detail
arriving home at the house at the end of the bridge _ detail
sheep in the forest _
— Moonlight
(1893, 55x68cm) — Evening
at Medfield, Massachusetts (1869, 30x45cm) — Afternoon
(1846) — The
Lackawanna Valley (1855) detail — Old
Homestead (1877) detail — Off
the Coast of Cornwall (1887) — Landscape
with Pond (1868, 31x51cm) — Valley
Near Perugia (1867, 63x48cm) — Autumn
(1859, 26x46cm) — End
of Day aka Montclair (1855, 42x30cm) — Étretat
(1874, 24x33cm)
— 40
images at Webshots |
^
Died on 03 August 1816: François~André Vincent,
French Neoclassical
painter, specialized in historical
subjects, born on 30 December 1746. 
