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The Cultivated Landscapes of George Inness
| Article
# : |
11575 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1986 |
3,016 Words |
| Author
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James F. Cooper
James F. Cooper is editor of American Arts Quarterly and art
critic for the New York City Tribune. |
An exhibition of sixty-three paintings by George Inness (1825-1894), the American nineteenth-century painter, opened at Washington's National Gallery of Art on June 22, 1986. The paintings have been brought together from private and public collections, and have previously been displayed during the past twelve months at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This is the first major showing of Inness' work to be seen by a national audience in nearly forty years.
The exhibition, which was organized by Michael Quick, Curator of American Art at the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, covers a span of fifty years in Inness' career, revealing the development of several artistic styles that evolved initially from a highly realistic one to the impressionist genre for which he is perhaps best known.
Comparing Twilight, painted by George Inness in the year 1860, to his later work The Clouded Sun, painted in 1891, does not merely produce a confrontation between a product of youth and one characterizing the artist's full maturity. Rather, it juxtaposes a vision that is primarily American and idealistic - that revels in its creative intensity, is as formally composed as a seventeenth-century painting by Claude Lorrain, and is infused with a compelling personal vision of Nature's grandeur - against a work of atmospheric vagueness that precludes formal design and rendered detail, emphasizing instead brush work and impressionist color over content and personal expression.
Understandably in our contemporary era, the impressionist works by George Inness are the ones that draw much of the critical acclaim and
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