George Inness
“Yet I do not believe that anyone, whether craftsman or connoisseur, will ever rightly comprehend the art of George Inness unless he places himself squarely on the platform of the man’ religious convictions, and seeks in his works those eliminations of the gross, or the material, in order that the spiritual may be seen, which was the aim and intention of his best and highest effort.” -Elliot Dangerfield, 1913
“The true use of art is, first, to cultivate the artist’s own spiritual nature.” - George Inness
By Christopher Volpe
Tonalism began largely with the atmospheric paintings of American artist George Inness (May 1, 1825 -August 3, 1894), whose passionate attempt to paint what he called “the reality of the unseen” did much to inspire the movement. At the time of his death in 1894, Inness was regarded as the finest landscape painter in America.
Spring Blossoms Montclair George Inness, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC
Inness began by emulating the Old Masters. Building on spotty apprenticeships and a few classes at the National Academy of Design, he developed a style not radically different from the prevailing Hudson River School’s. That all changed when he encountered, in his 30s, European artists such as Constable, Turner, and especially the French Barbizon painters. His later work (c. 1865-1894) evolved into a highly original combination of spiritualism, direct observation, principles of traditional painting, a lacy, unfussy painterly style, and quirky theories of sacred geometry now sadly lost to history.
Home at Monclair, 1892 by George Inness, The Clark Institute
Inness’s Hazy Morning, Montclair (1893), painted a few months before he died, exemplifies some of the main qualities of Tonalism that would mark the new approach to landscape he inspired. By the 1890s, Tonalism was well on its way to becoming everything that the still dominant (but getting tired) Hudson River style wasn’t: evocative paintings executed within a limited yet harmonious palette, subtle tonal dynamics, more twilights than daylights, and a Barbizon preference for the intimate over the grand. Following Inness (who got the idea from the Barbizon painters), the Tonalists favored the “civilized landscape” of ordinary shrubs and cultivated fields that, unlike the Hudson River artists’ majestic views of a wild and expansive Edenic North America, could actually be seen just about anywhere.
Summer in Montclair, 1884, George Inness
Hazy Morning, Montclair shrouds in mystery an otherwise ordinary domestic scene from Inness’s own literal backyard in New Jersey. The composition reflects personal theories he developed about beauty, color, light, and spiritual geometry. It’s also a wonderful example of the idea that strong landscape paintings are best designed around a dynamic arrangement of simple, ordered shapes. Inness is thought to have had an intuitive “feeling” for composition, and it’s worth noting how beautifully he violates a number of major conventions of “good” painting.
Defying time-tested rules of draftsmanship, he divides the composition into even fourths, the vertical and horizontal axes crossing nearly at the precise center. Details are nearly non-existent. He puts all the “action” in the middle ground (instead of the foreground), distorting the objects closest to the viewer that “should” be clearest. Most artists would avoid placing an obtrusive solid object, like a lollipop-shaped tree, smack in front of the viewer’s position, blocking the distance. What are our eyes supposed to do here? Inness leaves us little choice but to view the scene in its entirety, all at once, as a sort of magic lens into esoteric realms of being, which of course was the point all along.
Home of the Heron, George Inness, Chicago Institute of Art
Key to understanding his later and most characteristic works, such as Summer in Montclair (1884), is that while Inness is concerned with conveying emotion (one of his primary aims), he is also attempting to image spiritual truth. For Inness, the world was a projection of Spirit. He was enchanted, along with William James and Ralph Waldo Emerson, by the ideas of Swedish scientist, philosopher, and Christian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. The Swedish scholar’s “as above so below” philosophy of “correspondences” between the spiritual and material worlds asserted that Nature contains the expression of spiritual laws. Inness came to believe that if the divine could be revealed by contemplation of the natural world, it should be possible to convey that divine essence in paint: Artistic intuition could image “the invisible on the visible,” rendering the Divine directly accessible to humankind.
A Silver Morning, George Inness, Chicago Institute of Art.
Hazy Morning in Montclair, 1893, Inness, Butler Institute of American Art
Ultimately, Inness does what all great artists do: he creates a new (and to him, more “real”) world parallel to the one apprehensible to our everyday senses. Inness’s dissolving landscapes offer visual metaphors for matter permeated by the immaterial, the mundane transmuted into the mystical. There’s so much mysticism and atmosphere in Hazy Morning, Montclair that we almost sense that the vertical shapes (especially the central tree) conduct some kind of heavenly, incorporeal energy between the earth and the Unseen, along the lines of what Inness called “a subtle essence which exists in all things of the material world.” We can tell the “haze” is not entirely literal because of how sharp the barn roof appears versus everything else on the same plane, including the half-dissolved figure (who, intentionally, could be anyone, anywhere) to the right of the tree. Rather, it’s a device, Inness’s way of communicating his felt ideas about humanity and God.
Sunrise, 1887, George Inness, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
By using semi-abstract, indistinct forms over conventions of realism, Inness could be said to metaphorically destabilize the physical world (which he, like Plato, believed to be merely an artificial projection of eternal truth anyway). Matter and the immaterial oscillate; the image flickers between the earthly and the spiritual. By vizualizing the unsayable qualities of felt experience, Inness has given us the dawn not just of a new day but of a new world, and to our surprise, it’s the one we already know.
Inness’s Farm Landscape Cattle Pasture likewise takes on the indistinct, shimmering quality of an emotion, a memory, or a dream, a principle underlying a great deal of Tonalist painting. Here again, the material world borders on insubstantial because for Inness, painting increasingly became a way to explore the dual nature of the world as simultaneously “material” and divine.
Innes’s In the Orchard, Milton, like Hazy Morning, contains very little that is clearly delineated besides the sinuous tree trunk in the middle of the composition (which itself has the quality of semi-transparency). Only with careful looking does the figure of the woman coming toward us on the path vaporously emerge. The entire work comes to resemble a translucent tapestry, a lacy, gossamer veil swaying between one world and the next.
Farm Landscape Cattle Pasture, 1883 George Inness, San Diego Museum of Art
Inness is not being “Impressionistic” in these paintings; he objected to the label of Impressionist, a “fad” he denounced for producing flat paintings consisting of “a pancake of color” unable to genuinely respond to “the universal principle truth.” Nor does he copy nature so much as he opens it up for us to re-imagine. We become intuitively involved in completing his subjects out of the flickering stuff of memory and desire. For Inness the Swedenborgian, the beautiful geometries of the world are “correspondences” that mediate between our blind mortal life and a yearned-for “universal principle” of eternal Spirit.
Winter Sky, George Inness, Cleveland Museum of Art
Guided by a feeling for life, Inness draws a visionary’s veil across the familiar, and the effect is as if he is painting the here-and-not-here of two worlds, one of illusory reality and the other of mystical experience, both embodied in the everyday, and both beautiful. Legions of Tonalists would follow his lead.