There is a famous story about the American artist George Inness and his painting “The Lackawanna Railroad.” The year was 1855 and Inness, a struggling, 30-year-old landscape painter, had been commissioned by the first president of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad to paint its new roundhouse in Scranton, Pa.
He painted one picture but it was unsatisfactory. He had shown only one line of rails, all that existed at the time, but the president wanted him to show the additional three or four tracks planned for the future. He was also told to depict four trains, the entire rolling stock of the company, and to paint the letters D. L. & W. on a locomotive. Inness protested as an artist, but he gave in as head of a family. He needed the $75 commission.
The painting, a beautiful summer landscape with a locomotive chugging up a hill, hung in the company offices for many years until it was sold as part of a job lot of office equipment. It wound up in a junk shop in Mexico City where Inness, now an old man, and by this time quite famous, happened to come upon it while traveling. The artist kept it until his death, and the painting is now in the collection of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.
The story is valued for its irony and for what it says about the age-old relationship between patron and artist. Today, when we look at this painting, it hardly seems to matter how many rails or locomotives there are. Out of the scene he was compelled to paint, Inness created a vision of ordered beauty.
The current show at the Metropolitan Museum, which includes “The Lackawanna Valley” and 62 other paintings by Inness, is the first major show in 40 years by an artist who may be the best American landscape painter ever. The show spans Inness’s entire 50-year career, from his youthful imitations of Claude Lorrain, to his twilight-tinged summer idylls, to his violent thunderstorms, to the ethereal, haunting landscapes of his last years in Montclair, N.J.
A painting like “The Lackawanna Valley” also points up what a different kind of painter Inness was from his 19th Century contemporaries. Hudson River School painters like Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, Frederic Church, and Jasper Cropsey were committed to painting idealized, glorified images of American wilderness.
But Inness didn’t like the wilderness. His preference was for “civilized landscapes,” those transformed by man’s presence. He liked cultivated farmland better than woodlands. Industrialization was only just beginning to make its mark on the American landscape, and Inness enjoyed putting little railroad trains, factories, barges, and smoking chimneys into his paintings.
Inness was born 1825 in Newburgh N.Y., and lived and worked in the New York City area most of his life. He was a precocious artist who was mostly self-taught. By the time he was 21, he had established a studio in New York City. The prevailing philosophy in American art at his time was that an artist should be as faithful as possible to nature (while looking the other way when confronted with a factory). Landscape painting became an American religion, and it was considered somewhat decadent and backward-looking to indulge in the artificial devices of the European old masters.
Inness, however, learned all he could from the old masters. He made trips to Europe in 1851 and 1853. His earliest paintings copied Lorrain’s pictorial structure. Later, he came under the influence of the Barbizon School, a group of romantic French landscape painters dominated by Theodore Rousseau and Jean-Francois Millet.
A painting like “The Juniata River” (1856) shows both these influences. This is a somewhat mechanical composition, typical of Inness’s pastoral scenes. It also reveals Inness’s romantic side in its use of heightened color and dramatic light.
Inness wasn’t interested so much in describing nature as he was in using it to evoke a particular emotion in his viewers. That was his end, not the production of scenery. Inness disdained mere resemblance. When asked where a particular picture was painted, he replied, “Nowhere in particular; do you suppose I illustrate guidebooks? That’s a picture.”
And yet, viewers today, especially those from New Jersey, may recognize familiar places in Inness’s work. He was particularly fond of the Delaware Water Gap. He painted Pine Brook, and lived for a time in Eagleswood. Even some of his paintings of Montclair, though mostly rural in character, have something familiar about them.
But it’s because Inness had such an intimate approach to landscape that he is able to touch modern viewers in a way many of his contemporaries don’t. Today, Church’s and Bierstadt’s paintings can seem pretentious and overblown. But Inness still seems fresh. It’s easy to describe a standard Inness painting: a summer day, a graceful elm against the sky, grazing cattle, some water, a tiny figure lounging on a hillside. But there is always something extra in there.
Early in his career, he found that paintings made “under the impulse of a sympathetic feeling,” though not “correct,” had more charm and beauty than ones that were dutifully exact depictions of what he saw.
Inness was always after the animating principle in nature. For a time, he strove for such intangibles as wind, weather, temperature – those things that can’t be painted directly. He liked to focus on a startling effect of light or weather that made the painting seem like a particular moment— not just any afternoon on any day.
In “A Passing Shower” (1860), he captures the sense of a fleeting rain shower moving over the hills and fields. There are clouds in the distance and shadows of clouds in the foreground with the sunshine breaking through in the middle distance. It’s the sense of transience, of this fleeting moment, that makes this painting so evocative. Inness put it this way: “The true end of art is not to imitate a fixed material condition, but to represent a living motion.”
Inness was in love with twilight, particularly favored the late afternoon twilight when the sky is still a pale blue but the sun is low in the sky and casts a strong yellow light. We see it in such paintings as “Medfield” and “Autumn Oaks,” both painted in 1877.
From time to time, Inness showed a fascination with violent weather. The canvas became a stage on which he orchestrated menacing natural events. In “Approaching Storm” (1869), a painting that dates to Inness’s sojourn in Medfield, Mass., a big thunderhead gathers on a mountaintop, threatening the pastoral farm in the foreground. The painting beautifully captures the eerie light that sometimes precedes a summer storm.
What is most striking about Inness’s career is the progress toward a more and more spiritual mode of expression. In his last 20 years, he seemed less interested in the particulars of nature and more preoccupied with evocative generalities. His work takes on something of an impressionist quality, but not the scientific impressionism of Monet’s haystacks. Inness was never interested in light for its own sake. His paintings become monochromatic and misty, and his objects lose their firm definitions.
“Early Autumn, Montclair” (1888) is something of a transitional painting. Inness brings emotion to his subject, not through the image or the subject, but through his handling of the paint and his way of rendering the form. This is a very modern painting. The paint is put on violently. It’s scraped and scrubbed. The trees look as if they are exploding. It’s almost as if Inness felt it necessary to destroy his old system in order to grow.
In paintings like “The Old Farm, Montclair” and “Misty Morning, Montclair,” both of 1892, we have the aftermath of the explosion. In these paintings, objects are drained of substance. The characteristic light is still there, but it falls on trees, houses, and people who seem weightless and ghostlike. Movement is stilled. Everything seems made of the same ethereal stuff.
Inness’s last painting of 1894, the year he died, is titled “Morning, Catskill Valley (The Red Oaks).” Here, the artist has restored the color to his work, but it is not the robust, intense color of his youth. Yet, somehow, it is even more evocative. This is a ghost of the early Inness, but not in a negative sense: The more we look at it, the more we see that it is something higher. He has traded reality for spirituality.
Metropolitan Museum
1985
