Who is George Inness?

George Inness (May 1, 1825 – August 3, 1894) was a prominent American landscape painter.

One of the most influential American artists of the nineteenth century, Inness was influenced, in turn, by the Old Masters, the Hudson River school, the Barbizon school, and, finally, the theology of Emanuel Swedenborg, whose spiritualism found shimmering expression in the work of Inness’s maturity (1879–1894).

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Although Inness’s style evolved through positive stages greater than a prolific career that spanned more than forty years and 1,000 paintings, his works consistently earned approbation for their powerful, coordinated efforts to elicit height of mood, atmosphere, and emotion. Neither unqualified realist nor impressionist, Inness was a transitional figure who designed for his works to affix both the earthly and the ethereal in order to take control of the definite essence of a locale. A master of light, color, and shadow, he became noted for creating intensely ordered and complex scenes that often juxtaposed wooly or blurred elements with unfriendly and refined details to evoke an interweaving of both the creature and the spiritual flora and fauna of experience. In Inness’s words, he attempted through his art to disconcert the “reality of the unseen” and to connect the “visible on the invisible.”

Within his own lifetime, art critics hailed Inness as one of America’s greatest artists. Often called “the father of American landscape painting,” Inness is best known for his mature works that not solitary exemplified the Tonalist movement but moreover displayed an original and uniquely American style.

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