George Inness

George Inness was one of thirteen children and grew up ion Newark new Jersey. As a teenager he worked as an engraver, and received training from Regis Gignoux. He studied at the School at the National Academy of design. He studied a year in Rome. Returning to the states he married Delia Miller who died after only several months of marriage. A year later he married Elizabeth Hart, and they were to have six children.
Inness was about as strange a man as is imagineable. Here is a picture of him that gives some indication of how eccentric he was. My daughter just came in the room and said "that looks like you dad".
In Rome he was introduced to Swedenborgianism. I have made a habit of staying away from religion on this blog, but in order to discuss Inness I shall have to do that a little. Swedenborg 1688-1772 was a Swedish scientist turned mystic and religious philosopher whose body of writings are the core documents of a small sect who believe them to be the third testament of the bible. For you religiously educated, they reject the doctrine of sola fide and hold to a oneness doctrine rejecting the idea of Gods triune nature and share with the Mormons a belief in eternal marriage. If all of that means nothing to you, I am not surprised, but the purpose of this blog is not theology, so I will rush on.There was also a lot of overlap between the Swedenborgians and
the spiritualist movement in the 19th century. Many of the Spiritualists attempted to communicate with the dead, although Swedenborg himself warns against this. It is forgotten how huge the spiritualist movement was in America, it lasted until the second world war, by which time I think most of its adherents had gone to their own graves and are now probably incommunicado. Those of you who have been to any of the old spiritualist villages in New England, like Oak Bluffs on Martha's Vineyard, or Bayside in Lincolnville Maine are familiar with this history. Many of the important thinkers in the 19th century were Swedenborgians, including Emerson and the other Concord transcendentalists. Heres tonights bizarre factoid......Johhny Appleseed was in fact a Swedenborgian missionary.
It was recorded that when Inness spoke it was hard to tell where art left off and religion began.
Inness constructed elaborate theories of color based on Swedenborgian theology. He also used mathematical formulas to develop his designs.

Inness was a year older than Church, but when Church died his art was totally forgotten. He died in obscurity. Inness developed and progressed with or ahead of the developments in art , morphing from a Claudian style classical landscape painter, as illustrated by the paintings on this page into a Barbizon style painter and finally into a tonalist and nearly abstract painter. Because he was constantly changing, his art never went out of fashion like all the rest of his Hudson River school contemporaries. When he died his body laid in state at the National Academy of Design and he was praised as possibly Americas greatest painter.

Inness outstripped his Hudson River school friends with a simple idea which he developed, incidentally, after the period in which these, his earliest paintings were made. That idea was:

THE FORMS OF NATURE WERE TO BE ARRANGED AS A VISUAL LANGUAGE TO EXPRESS THE EMOTIONS AND THOUGHTS OF THE ARTIST.

The implication of this is that the painting is a decorated surface rather than an illusionistic window. After his earliest period his paintings became inventions in the studio that were arranged by mathematical, religious and emotional systems of construction. They were less and less real places. As they became less cartographic they became ever more poetic. They are deeply intellectual and complex. There is a mystery to his paintings that I find in the work of no other American landscape painter.

I can disassemble and reverse engineer a Church or a Cropsey. I have seen their drawings and I understand how their paintings were made. Innesss is a different thing, I understand some of what goes on in them but a lot of what I see there is unfathomable . It is a language peculiar to Inness himself. I don't think I have ever seen an artist so hard to imitate. I have seen many artists who could ape his mannerisms in a superficial way, and when I have seen their work I have thought "Oh they have been studying Inness". But I have never seen any artist who could really do IT.


Inness went through a lifelong evolution that took him from being the painter of these Claudian landscapes to this............................

I will continue on Inness tomorrow.