George Inness

1825-1894

George Inness (1825–1894) was an American landscape painter, born in Newburgh, New York, who began under the sway of the Hudson River School before absorbing the Old Masters and, on trips to Europe, the loose brushwork and darker palette of the Barbizon school. Working from New York to Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Florida, he built a highly personal style that moved from panoramic, dramatically skied views of American and European scenery toward the softer, more abstracted, deeply atmospheric paintings of his last decade. Introduced to Swedenborgian theology in Rome, Inness came to treat landscape as a bridge between the visible and the spiritual, layering hazy passages against sharp detail to suggest something beyond mere observation. Acclaimed in his lifetime and later called the father of American landscape painting, he anticipated Tonalism and produced over a thousand works now held by museums including the Metropolitan, the National Gallery, and the Art Institute of Chicago. He died in Scotland in 1894, reportedly while watching a sunset.