Visionary Genius

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Sunny Autumn Day 1892 George Inness

The works of landscape painter George Inness (1825-1894) were both revered and dismissed in his lifetime. Although he was considered one of the leading and most influential artists of his time, his work eventually became controversial as he relentlessly pursued the development of a new means of expression in landscape painting. His paintings became more evocative and less realistic during the last decades of his life, breaking away from the acceptable representational art of the day and into Tonalism.

He wrote in a letter to art critic Ripley Hitchcock in 1884, “I had begun to see that elaborateness in detail, did not gain me meaning. A part carefully finished, my forces were exhausted. I could not sustain it everywhere and produce the sense of spaces and distances and with them the subjective mystery of nature with which wherever I went I was filled. I dwelt upon what I saw and dreamed, in disgust at my ability to …