GEORGE INNESS (1825-1894)
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Medfield1877
Oil on canvas |
ARTWORK
Inness moved to Medfield, Massachusetts in 1860 to escape the pressures of the art world in New York City. The landscape featured here was painted during his second period in Medfield, after he returned from Italy in 1875. Inness depicts a landscape that is calm and serene with autumn colors and expressive brushwork, bathed in a mild afternoon sunlight. The mood is melancholy and tranquil, perhaps reflecting his memories of Medfield as a peaceful place to live and work. The painting represents a transitional phase in Inness’s work, in which the artist combined detailed renderings of the natural world and the effects of light and color to evoke a spiritual presence.
ART HISTORY
During the 19th-century, Americans were inspired by the romanticism of the American landscape. Inspired by the vast areas of land that comprised the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, Americans envisioned the land as unspoiled by civilization, embodying the presence of God and Manifest Destiny. As territories expanded and populations increased, the perception of landscape painting, in Europe and America, shifted from allegorical to geographical. Landscape painting would henceforth derive its power from qualities inherent in nature, rather than from literary, biblical, or mythological sources. For example, George Inness was influenced by three major movements that embraced the power of nature: The Hudson River school, the Barbizon School in France, and a movement known as Luminism. The Hudson River School was comprised of painters who depicted landscapes in the Hudson River Valley, including the Catskill, Adirondack, and White Mountains. In Europe, the Barbizon school embraced the native landscape of France, such as the Forest of Fountainbleu. Luminism was an American landscape style that emphasized the effects of light, often portraying the landscape as reflecting spiritual presence. As a whole, landscape painting during the 19th-century had an empirical focus, with the visual splendors of nature serving as the catalyst for lofty conceptions of the natural world.
ARTIST
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George Inness was born in Newburgh, New York to John William Inness, a farmer, and his wife, Clarissa Baldwin. Inness's family moved to New Jersey when he was about the age of five. During his early training, he studied for several months with an itinerant painter, John Jesse Barker, and in his teens he worked as a map engraver in New York City. In 1851, Inness traveled to Europe where he spent fifteen months in Rome, and studied the landscape paintings of French artists Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. He also met the painter William Page who mostly likely introduced him to the theology of Emanuel Swedenborg. Inness moved to Medfield in 1860 with the intention of finding a better market for his Barbizon style paintings. In 1870, Inness went to Rome with the intention of staying there permanently, but later decided to return to Medfield in 1875. Inness’s work of the 1880s reveals his interest in Swedenborgian theology, the belief that the spiritual world is present in nature.
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CONNECTIONS
George Inness painted during a time that encompassed a period of westward expansion, in which the United States expanded its territories to the west of the Mississippi river. Due to this movement westward, expeditions were arranged to explore new territories, and artists drew their inspiration from them. Subsequently, landscape paintings would address themes of Manifest Destiny, spirituality, Transcendentalism, and scientific discoveries.
Thomas Cole, for example, was a leading artist of the Hudson River School who painted “The Course of Empire, which depicted civilization through various stages of growth and destruction. David Thoreau, the author of Walden, wrote of his experiences in the woods, capturing the experience of man’s relationship to nature:
"Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it." […] "We need the tonic of wildness, — to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen [American coot] lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground."
Thomas Cole, for example, was a leading artist of the Hudson River School who painted “The Course of Empire, which depicted civilization through various stages of growth and destruction. David Thoreau, the author of Walden, wrote of his experiences in the woods, capturing the experience of man’s relationship to nature:
"Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it." […] "We need the tonic of wildness, — to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen [American coot] lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground."
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Thomas Cole, Course of Empire (Destruction), 1836, oil on canvas; Timothy O’Sullivan, Shoshone Falls, Snake River, Idaho, View Across the Top of the Falls, 1874, albumen print; John James Audubon, Black-bellied Darter, engraving, etching, aquatint, and watercolor.
DISCUSSION
Medfield is a painting about a specific place, but also represents an ideal depiction of a landscape that transcends time and place. How is the scene ideal or idealized? Could you find an area like this to paint around Montgomery? What time of day do you think it is? What season do you think it is?