More Inness in the 1860's

This Inness is of Lake Albano in Italy and was done in 1869. All of the pictures I have posted so far have in my opinion been done using Hudson River school technology. They all have that "something" which is Inness, but they are still luminist style paintings.

But as early as 1860 Inness began moving toward the Frensch style of painting and away from luminism. I guess no artists development is absolutely linear. Tomorrow we will see several more paintings from just after this year which also bear the same influence.This painting has a Dutch look to it. It also is a more ordinary place. There is a view to a distance, but it is not a singular picturesque vista. There is a noticeable economy of means in this painting too. In the tree behind the figure for instance, the few branches in the light are worked up, but everything to the right of that is not. There is more mystery and slight of hand in this picture than the typical Hudson River school effort. But the major difference is the surface, there is a rough painterly finish on this painting that is light years away from the enameled handling of the luminist painters. Inness is using the bands of light and dark to get recession. I spoke about layering light and dark values here.

In the period when this was painted Inness was living outside of Boston in the village of Medfield. So everything in this painting is now buried beneath an urban landscape. There may now be a Jiffylube right where that little man is sitting.

The "spotlight" treatment of the lights seems not so Hudson River school to me also. This is not the only example I have seen of an artist foreshadowing a much later period in their development. I know that Willard Metcalf did it in his Gloucester paintings on the trip he made there with Hassam. That might make an interesting post.

The painting above reminds me of James Hart and except for that idiosyncratic oddity that Inness brought to all of his paintings, could have been made by any one of a number of Hudson River school painters. Inness did a lot of pastoral pictures of this sort in the 1860's

I can't imagine any one else making this one though. It is obviously Barbizon influenced. The tree is reminiscent of a Corot motif and note the softened abbreviated handling through out, but especially in the fore ground . The design is quirky too. That tree leaning up and out of the picture to the viewers left is unconventional, and the pyramidoidal grouping of the trees in the background is very arranged looking. Notice that the water below that, also forms an inverted pyramid. This painting also has a lot of that "strangeness" that makes Inness so unique and interesting.

It is too hot to continue tonight, I am going to leave the studio and look for somewhere a little cooler. I will see you tomorrow, when I will show paintrings made in Medfield Massachusetts.

images from artrenewal.org and athenaeum.org