*NNESS, GEORGE. 



375 



gree due to the advantages of his training. The 

 biographies gravely state that he studied art in 

 Newark, N. J., which can hardly have been a 

 center of art education fifty years ago. His 

 home was in Newark from 1829 until about 1843, 

 when his family removed to NVw York. Like 

 Durand, Kensett, and Casilear, he began his pro- 

 fessional life as an engraver, but the field was 

 too narrow, and it was rebellion against the 

 burin's limitations, as well as ill health, that 

 turned him toward landscape painting, at first 

 under the guidance of Regis Gignoux, a French- 

 American artist, who as a pupil of Delaroche 

 and of the Ecole des Beaux Arts had received a 

 far more thorough training than his American 

 contemporaries. Their opportunities, indeed, 

 from the time of the father of American land- 

 scape art, Thomas Cole, who died soon after In- 

 ness began his career, to the days when Diissel- 

 dorf became the fashion, or in truth down to the 



GEORGE INNESS. 



Paris movement in the early seventies, were most 

 restricted. Yet Mr. Inness never became an ac- 

 tual pupil of Gignoux, and he was practically 

 self-educated. Pie was never thoroughly ground- 

 ed in drawing, and he never studied the science 

 of composition nor the use of colors in the 

 schools. In those early years of his career Cour- 

 bet was warring in behalf of realism in France, 

 Millet was painting "Le Vanneur" and other 

 masterpieces at Barbizon, and Rousseau was in- 

 terpreting landscape with marvelous science, 

 force, and insight, but of all this the handful of 

 struggling artists in America knew nothing. 

 This isolation, ill health, poverty, and the blank 

 indifference of his little public were burdens 

 which Mr. Inness bore for many years. What 

 sustained him was his overmastering passion for 

 his art, a demand for expression in the painter's 

 terms which shook the frail tenement of his 

 fiery spirit and refused to be stifled. Moods of 

 discouragement weighed upon him, and there 

 were times when the brush dropped from his fal- 

 tering hand only to be caught up again when the 

 cloud passed and his controlling genius reas- 

 serted its sway. Nature, and no art academy, 



was his school, and even in his first visit to 

 Europe, when he remained in Italy from 1851 to 

 1853, he studied natural scenery rather than the 

 paintings of the old masters. In 1854 he visited 

 Paris and probably saw for the first time " the 

 men of 1830 " with whom he had so much in 

 common. As a matter of course his earliest 

 manner, from 1846 to 1860, shared the labored 

 objective style of his immediate associates of 

 the so-called Hudson River school. But he was 

 never content with limitations, whether inher- 

 ited from Diisseldorf or Italian decadence. He 

 was constantly experimenting, forever searching 

 for truth, and the pictures painted in the sixties 

 show a broadening of his vision and an increas- 

 ing impatience at overelaboration, sometimes 

 with eccentric, sometimes with splendid results. 

 His "Delaware Valley," painted in 1863, is a 

 noble example of a largeness of design rare in the 

 landscapes of our day, accompanied by a no less 

 distinguished maintenance of pictorial quality. 

 Of nearly the same date is a large painting of a 

 storm on the Delaware which exhibits the same 

 qualities iij a conspicuous degree, save that the 

 execution shows the excess of finish so marked 

 in Rousseau's earlier manner for example, in the 

 well-known example from the Probasco collec- 

 tion, now in the Walters Gallery. The changes 

 of this time continued through the seventies, 

 and by 1880 we find the artist composing with 

 absolute breadth, reckoning with masses and 

 planes rather than details, save where details 

 were needed as accents, and expressing him- 

 self first of all in terms of color rendered with 

 a fluency and energy of brushwork which grew 

 more marked in his later years. He was an im- 

 petuous and passionate painter. A vision rose 

 before him, and no force could stay the hand in- 

 stantly outstretched toward the canvas. To un- 

 derstand his art we must refer again and again 

 to the nervous force, indomitable energy, and 

 perfect absorption of a true type of the artistic 

 temperament. Although we have spoken of his 

 various periods and change of manner, the fact 

 that his last manner was at the opposite pole 

 from the first offers no special significance for 

 those who recall the successive stages of Rem- 

 brandt, or Turner, or Rousseau. What is sig- 

 nificant, however, is the fact that this evolution 

 proceeded from within, and was affected only in 

 a minor degree by art study or the influence of 

 association and environment. His life in New 

 York was confined for the most part to his 

 studio, and to the society of artist friends to whom 

 he poured forth with singular eloquence his theo- 

 ries of art and of metaphysics, for the spiritual 

 side of art made a constant appeal to his fervid 

 and mystical imagination. In his first travels in 

 Europe, and also when he lived in Italy from 

 1871 to 1875, it was Nature rather than the paint- 

 ings of others which first attracted him. He 

 was never overawed by rank or names. The 

 " Slave Ship " of Turner, an artist with whom he 

 might have been held to have much in common, 

 he boldly declared to be " the most infernal piece 

 of claptrap ever painted." In Italy he spent the 

 larger part of his time in painting landscapes, 

 not in the study of the galleries. That this was 

 not due to self-content or indifference was patent 

 to every one. He observed the work of others, 

 but independence was ingrained in his nature ; 



