II
II
1825-1894
Aplainman of the business world, knowing nothing of the peculiar manifestations of the artistic mind, would be very apt to wonder over the mental make-up of a George Inness. An artist’s way of looking at things is never quite sensible to the man in the street. It is too temperamental, too impulsive; and Inness was supertemperamental even for an artist. When he expressed himself in paint he was very sane; but when he argued, his auditors thought him erratic. And not without reason. He was easily stirred by controversy, and in the heat of discussion he often discoursed like a mad rhapsodist. His thin hands and cheeks, his black eyes, ragged beard, and long dark hair, the dramatic action of his slight figure as he walked and talked, seemed to complete the picture of the perfervid visionary.
He was always somewhat hectic. As a boy he was delicate, suffered from epilepsy, and was mentally overwrought. His physician had nothing to recommend but fresh air. As a man, oneof his hearers over the dinner-table, after listening to his exposition of the feminine element in landscape, or some allied theme, said: “Mr. Inness, what you need is fresh air.” Inness used to tell this story about himself with a little smile, as though conscious of having appeared extravagant. As for fresh air in the sense of out-of-doors, he knew more about it than all his business acquaintances put together; but in the sense of its clearing the vision so that he could see things in a matter-of-fact light, it was wholly unavailing. He was born with the nervous organization of the enthusiast. That is not the best temperament imaginable for a practical business man.
And yet Inness certainly thought that his views about life, faith, government, and ethics were sound and applicable to all humanity. Art was only a part of the universal plan. In his theory of the unities everything in the scheme entire dropped into its appointed place. He could show this, to his own satisfaction at least, by the symbolism of numbers, just as he could prove immortality by the argument for continuity. All his life he was devoted to mystical speculations. He had his faith in divination, astrology, spiritualism, Swedenborgianism. And he was greatly stirred by social questions. During the Rebellion he volunteered to fight for the freedom of the slave but was rejected as physically unfit; and later he became interested in labor problems, believed in Henry George and the Single Tax,and had views about a socialistic republic. He never changed. In his seventieth year he was still discoursing on Swedenborg, on love, on truth, on the unities, with unabated enthusiasm. To expect such a man to be “practical” would be little less than an absurdity, and to expect a practical man to understand him would be almost as futile.
But the fever of intensity that burned in Inness and his visionary way of looking at things were the very features that made possible his greatness as an artist. There is something in the abnormal view—one hardly knows what—that makes for art. Certainly the “practical” work of the camera gives only a statement of fact where the less accurate drawing of a Millet gives something that we call “artistic.” The lens of the camera records mechanically and coldly, which may account for the prosaic quality of photography; but the retina of the artist’s eye records an impression enhanced by the imagination, which may account for the poetry of art. Whichever way we put it, it is the human element that makes the art. The painter does not record the facts like a machine; he gives his impression of the facts. Inness, with his exalted way of seeing, was full of impressions and was always insisting upon their vital importance.
“The true purpose of the painter,” Mr. Sheldon reports him as saying, “is simply to reproduce in other minds the impression which a scene hasmade upon him. A work of art is not to instruct, not to edify, but to awaken an emotion. Its real greatness consists in the quality and force of this emotion.”
And he practised this preaching. Such nervous manifestations as enthusiasm, emotion, and imagination working together and producing an impression were the means wherewith he constructed pictures in his mind. They made up his point of view, and without them we should perhaps have heard little of George Inness as a painter.
It was no mean or stinted equipment. In fact, Inness had too many impressions, had too much imagination. His diversity of view opposed singleness of aim. While he was trying to record one impression upon the canvas, half a dozen others would rush in. Cleveland Cox, who knew him well, said that he changed his mood and point of view with the weather, and if he started a canvas with a storm piece in the morning, it was likely to end in the evening with a glorious sunset, if the weather corresponded. He was never satisfied with his work; he was always altering it and amending it, painting pictures one on top of another, until a single canvas sometimes held a dozen superimposed landscapes.
The late William H. Fuller used to tell the story of buying a landscape in Inness’s studio one afternoon and going to get the picture the next day, only to find an entirely differentpicture on the canvas. To his protests Inness replied:
“It is a good deal better picture than the other.”
“Yes, but I liked the other better.”
“Well, you needn’t take it—needn’t pay for it.”
“It isn’t a question of losing money. I have lost my picture. It is buried under that new one.”
Even when not bothered by many impressions, Inness had great difficulty in contenting himself with his work. It was never quite right. There was a certain fine feeling or sentiment that he had about nature and he wished to express it in his picture; but he found when the sentiment was strong, the picture looked weak in the drawing, had little solidity or substance; and when the solidity was put in with exact lines and precise textures, then the sentiment fared badly. He knew very well where the trouble lay.
“Details in the picture must be elaborated only enough fully to reproduce the impression. When more is done the impression is weakened and lost, and we see simply an array of external things which may be very cleverly painted and may look very real, but which do not make an artistic painting. The effort and the difficulty of an artist is to combine the two; namely, to make the thought clear and to preserve the unity of impression. Meissonier always makes his thought clear; he is most painstaking with details,but he sometimes loses in sentiment. Corot, on the contrary, is to some minds lacking in objective force. He tried for years to get more objective force, but he found that what he gained in that respect he lost in sentiment.”
This is Inness’s own statement of the case and it enables us to understand why many of his later canvases were vague, indefinite, often vapory. He was seeking to give a sentiment or feeling rather than topographical facts. When the facts looked too weak, he tried to strengthen them here and there by bringing out notes and tones a little sharper with the result of making them look hard or too protruding. After several passings back and forth from strength to weakness, from sentiment to fact, the canvas began to show a kneaded and thumbed appearance. Its freshness was gone and its surface looked tortured and “bready.” He was hardly ever free from this attempt to balance between two stools. It is a plague that bothers all painters, and no doubt many of them would agree with Inness in saying:
“If a painter could unite Meissonier’s careful reproduction of details with Corot’s inspirational power, he would be the very god of art.”
But Inness was much nearer to Corot than to Meissonier. He loved sentiment more than clever technique, and perhaps as a result left many “swampy” canvases behind him. His studio was filled with them. He used to takethem from the floor and work upon them, sometimes half a dozen in a day. He never was “the perfect master of the brush” that we have heard him called, though he was an acceptable, and often a very powerful, technician. He usually began by basing a canvas in a warm gray or a raw umber tint, afterward sketching in with charcoal or pencil the general outline of forms and objects. His pigments at first were thin, and his canvas in its general distribution of masses was little more than stained. Upon that foundation he kept adding stronger notes, glazing his shadows to keep them transparent and push them back, and placing his opaque lights on top of the glaze. In this way he gradually developed the picture, keying up first one part and then another, until finally he drew the whole picture into unity and harmony.
It was most interesting to see Inness at work in this keying-up process. He always painted standing, and would walk backward and forward, putting on dabs here and rubs there with great expertness. He was a painter in oils, seldom employing any other medium, and yet he would use on his canvas almost anything that the impulse of the moment told him might prove effective. One day I watched him for fifteen minutes trying to deepen the shadows in a tree with a lead-pencil. The canvas was dry at the time and he did not want to put any more wet paint upon it. As he painted he talked,argued, declaimed, glared at you over the top of his glasses with apparently little embarrassment to himself or detriment to his canvas.
Painting he believed he had reduced to a scientific formula, but he kept changing the formula. Rules of procedure, too, he had in abundance, but they also kept shifting. At one time he insisted that a picture should have three planes—the middle plane to contain the centre of interest, the foreground to be a prologue, and the background an epilogue to this central plane. At another time he would spread a half-tone throughout the whole picture, keeping his sky low in key, and upon this neutral ground he would place lights and darks, making them brilliant and sparkling by contrast. Others before him—notably the Fontainebleau-Barbizon men—had worked with similar rules in mind, but Inness was quite original in his application. And he was always moving on to something new and better. Ripley Hitchcock quotes from one of his letters:
“I have changed from the time I commenced because I had never completed my art; and as I do not care about being a cake, I shall remain dough, subject to any impression which I am satisfied comes from the region of truth.”
What Inness was at the time he commenced may be gathered from another quotation from the same authority:
“My early and much of my later life was borneunder the distress of a fearful nervous disease which very much impaired my ability to bear the painstaking in my studies which I could have wished. I began, of course, as most boys do, but without any art surroundings whatever. A boy now would be able to commence almost anywhere under better auspices than I could have had then, even in a city. I was in the barefoot stage, and, although my father was a well-to-do farmer, the boys dressed very much in Joseph’s coat style as to color, the different garments being equally variegated, while schooling consisted of the three R’s, and a ruler, with a rattan by way of change.”
At fourteen Inness received some instruction in drawing from a man named Barker, and at nineteen he was working as a map-engraver with Sherman and Smith in New York. It is said that he engraved several plates, but Inness himself evidently counted this apprenticeship of little value, for he later said:
“When almost twenty I had a month with Regis Gignoux, my health not permitting me to take advantage of study at the Academy in the evening, and this is all the instruction I ever had from any artist.”
He was virtually self-taught as a youth, but his later work was developed and somewhat influenced by the study of other painters at home and abroad. At first he studied Cole and Durand, and his pictures were rather panoramicin theme and hard in drawing. He worked much over detail, and at this early time must have been acquired a knowledge of form and a store of visual memories which were to serve him thereafter. The brittle landscapes of Inness’s youth are seldom seen to-day. What became of them no one knows. He sold them for any sum that would temporarily keep the wolf from the door, and, passing into the hands of unappreciative people, they have perhaps perished. I never heard him so much as mention his very early work, though in his letter to Ripley Hitchcock he speaks of some of his studies under Gignoux as being “very elaborate.”
In 1850 he was married, and through the assistance of one of his patrons, Mr. Ogden Haggerty, he went to Italy and spent fifteen months there, returning through Paris, seeing the Salon, and the work of Rousseau for the first time.
“Rousseau was just beginning to make a noise. A great many people were grouped about a little picture of his which seemed to me metallic. Our traditions were English; and French art, particularly in landscape, had made but little impression upon us.”
Just when he made this statement is not apparent, but certainly it was not his final estimate of Rousseau and French landscape. He was later on much influenced by Corot, Rousseau, and Daubigny; but with his first long stay in Europe,chiefly near Rome, it was to be expected that the romance and glamour of the place with such classical painters as Salvator, Claude, and Poussin would sway him.
The second period of his development, dating from about 1853 to 1875, is full of diverse influences. Succeeding trips to Europe and repeated studies of European art rather disturbed his preconceived opinions, and made him doubtful. At one time he would work in one vein; at another time he would reverse himself and go back to his early affinities. It was a period of struggle not only with his art but with the more purely material affair of gaining a livelihood. He lived during this time for four years at Medfield, Massachusetts, then at Eagleswood, New Jersey; and in both places painted some notable canvases, though they were not popular with the buying public.
The “Peace and Plenty,” now at the Metropolitan Museum, painted in 1865, is a huge affair, and the wonder is that it was not a huge failure. It is a little too diversified in the lights, and a bit spotty, perhaps, but it is rather broadly handled with a flat brush, and, all told, a remarkable canvas for the time. It represents him under Italian inspiration. The “Evening at Medfield,” also in the Metropolitan, painted in 1875, suggests French influence, perhaps Daubigny. It is broader, freer, thinner in handling, simpler in masses, and has more unity.None of the pictures at this period are counted his best output, but they are not the less works of decided merit.
It was after four continuous years in Europe (1871-1875) that Inness came into a third style of work (the “Evening at Medfield” indicates it), quite his own, quite American, and quite splendid. It was during this stay abroad that he seemed finally to find himself. His brush broadened, his light grew more subtle, his color became richer and fuller. Corot had taught him how to sacrifice detail to the mass, Rousseau had improved his use of the tree, Daubigny gave him many hints about atmosphere; from Decamps he learned how to drive a light with darks, and Delacroix opened to him a gamut of deep, rich color. He was now in position to graft the French tradition of landscape upon the American stock. And this he did, but in his own manner and with many lapses, even failures, by the way.
All through this third period, and for that matter up to his death, Inness was experimenting with landscape. Every canvas was a new adventure in color, light, and air. In his last period he seemed to see landscape in related masses of color rather than in linear extensions; and so he painted it holding the color patches together with air and illuminating the whole mass by a half-mysterious light. It was not attenuated color—mauves, pinks, and sad grays—but strong reds, blues, greens, and yellowskeyed up oftentimes to a high pitch and fire-hued by sunlight. Nor were they put on the canvas in little dots and dabs, but rather shown in large masses brought together for massed effect and made resonant by contrast.
evening“Evening at Medfield,” by George Inness.In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.(click image to enlarge)
“Evening at Medfield,” by George Inness.
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.(click image to enlarge)
Almost all of his later pictures will be found to hinge upon color, light, and atmosphere. He was very fond of moisture-laden air, rain effects, clouds, rainbows, mists, vapors, fogs, smokes, hazes—all phases of the atmosphere. In the same way he fancied dawns, dusks, twilights, moonlights, sunbursts, flying shadows, clouded lights—all phases of illumination. And again, he loved sunset colors, cloud colors, sky colors, autumn tints, winter blues, spring grays, summer greens—all phases of color. And these not for themselves alone, but rather for the impression or effect that they produced. If he painted a moonlight, it was with a great spread of silvery radiance, a hushed effect in the trees, a still air, and the mystery of things half seen; when he painted an early spring morning, he gave the vapor rising from the ground, with dampness in the air, voyaging clouds, and a warming blue in the sky; with an Indian summer afternoon there was the drowsy hum of nature lost in dreamland and the indefinable regret of things passing away. His “Rainy Day—Montclair” has the bend and droop of foliage heavy with rain, the sense of saturation in earth and air, the suggestion of thevery smell of rain. The “Delaware Water Gap” shows the drive of a storm down the valley, with the sweep of the wind felt in the clouds, the trees, and the water. The “Summer Silence” is well named, for again it gives that feeling of the hushed woods in July, the deep shadows, the dense foliage that seems to sleep and softly breathe.
Always the impression—the feeling which he himself felt in the presence of nature and tried to give back in form and color upon canvas. I remember very well standing beside him before his “Niagara” and hearing him say what interested him in that scene. It was not so much the thundering mass of the waters, the volume and power, the sublimity of the cataract, as the impression of clouds of mist and vapor boiling up from the great caldron and being struck into color-splendor by the sunlight. Only an Inness in the presence of Niagara could have thrown emphasis upon so ethereal a phase as its mists and color. They made the impression and he responded to it.
Every feature of landscape had its peculiar sentiment to him. He said so many times and with no uncertain voice:
“Rivers, streams, the rippling brook, the hillside, the sky, clouds—all things that we see—can convey sentiment if we are in the love of God and the desire of truth. Some persons suppose that landscape has no power of conveyinghuman sentiment. But this is a great mistake. The civilized landscape peculiarly can; and therefore I love it more and think it more worthy of reproduction than that which is savage and untamed. It is more significant.”
sunset“Sunset at Montclair,” by George Inness.(click image to enlarge)
“Sunset at Montclair,” by George Inness.(click image to enlarge)
That last statement of his about the civilized landscape is well worth noting, because that was the landscape he painted. His subjects are related to human life, and some of our interest in his pictures is due to the fact that he gives us thoughts, emotions, and sensations that are comprehensible by all. He tells things that every one may have thought but no one before him so well expressed. In other words, he brings our own familiar landscape home to us with new truth and beauty. This, it may be presumed, is the function of the poet and the painter in any land. It was the quality that made Burns and Wordsworth great and may account in measure for the fame of Rembrandt, Hobbema, Constable—yes, and Inness.
When he was young there were traditions of the Hudson River school in the air. The “mappy” landscape with its crude color and theatrical composition held the place of honor. Inness was probably captivated by it at first sight, but he soon discovered its emptiness. It had no basis in nature; it was not the landscape we see and know. The “Course of Empire” and the “Voyage of Youth” were only names for studio fabrications. The truly poetic landscapelay nearer home. This was what Inness called the “civilized landscape,” the familiar landscape, thepaysage intime, the one we all see and know because it has always been before us—its very nearness perhaps blinding us to its beauty.
How hard it is to believe that the true poetry of the world lies close about us! We keep fancying that romance is not in our native village, but in Rome or Constantinople or Cairo; and that the poetic landscape is not that of the wood-lot behind the house, but that of Arden Forest or some Hesperidian garden far removed from us. Emerson has noted that at sea every ship looks romantic but the one we sail in. Yet there is plenty of romance in our ship if we have the eyes to see it; and there is abundance of beauty in the wood-lot if we have the intentness of purpose to study it out and understand it. Any one can admire the “view” from a mountain-top, but it takes some imagination to see beauty in the quiet meadow. And after you have seen it it requires a great deal of labor and skill to tell what you have seen. Wordsworth and Constable made more failures with it than successes. Just so with Inness. He shot wide of the mark innumerable times, but when he hit, it was with very decided effect.
A love of the familiar landscape would seem to have always been with Inness. After a period of following the Hudson River panorama of nature undefiled by man, he gave it up. Whilein Rome he produced some semiclassic landscapes, but he gave them up, too. Not so with the Fontainebleau-Barbizon landscape. Rousseau and his band had broken with the classic and were producing thepaysage intimeto which Hobbema (not Constable, of whom they knew nothing) had called their attention through his pictures in the Louvre. They had done in France just what Inness had sought to do in America: they had abandoned the grandiloquent and put in its place the familiar. Inness was in sympathy with them almost from the moment he first saw their work. Had he been born in France, no doubt he would have been a member of the Rousseau-Dupré group.
Again it is worth noticing in passing that all of the so-called “men of 1830” were really provincial in what they produced. Corot painted Ville d’Avray, Rousseau, Dupré, and Diaz the Fontainebleau forest, Daubigny the Seine and the Marne. None of their work represents the south or the east of France, and none of it carries beyond France. It is localized about Paris. Just so with the work of Inness. It is emphatically American, but limited to the North Atlantic States. The appearances which he portrayed are peculiar to the region lying east of the Alleghanies. In his pictures the light and coloring, the forms and drift of clouds, the mists and hazes, the trees and hills, the swamps and meadows may be recognized as belonging to NewJersey or New York or New England, but none of them belongs to Minnesota or Louisiana or California. He pictured the American landscape perhaps more completely than any other painter before or since his time; but his “civilized landscape” was nevertheless limited as regards its geographical range.
Nor would we have it otherwise. All the masters of art have been provincial so far as subject goes. Titian, Velasquez, and Rembrandt never cared to go beyond their own bailiwicks for material. And Inness—though he may not rank with those just mentioned—found all the material he needed within fifty miles of New York. It was the discovery of this material, his point of view regarding it, what he did with it, and what he made us see in it, that perhaps gives him his high rank in American art.
The man and his impulsive nature never changed, though he kept shifting his methods and his point of view from year to year. He went his own pace and was always something of a recluse. The art movements about him interested him in only a slight way. The Academy of Design honored him with membership, but he cared little about it. The Society of American Artists elected him a member also, but he cared even less for the brilliant painting of the young men than for the weak performances of the academicians. He kept very much to himself and painted on in his own absorbed, impulsive fashion.His studio was only a bare barn of a room with a few crazy chairs in it. Wall-hangings, stuffs, screens, brass pots, shields, spears—the artistic plunder which one usually finds in a painter’s apartment—he regarded as so much trumpery. In his later days he came and went to his studio from Montclair, seeing landscapes out of the car-window, and in his mind’s eye seeing them upon his canvases. His art swayed him completely.
meadows“Hackensack Meadows,” by George Inness.(click image to enlarge)
“Hackensack Meadows,” by George Inness.(click image to enlarge)
He had no pupils, though he corrected, advised, and instructed many young painters after his own method. It was a decidedly arbitrary teaching. Elliott Daingerfield tells a story of one of his own landscapes in which a rail fence was running down into the foreground. When Inness was asked in to criticise the canvas, he objected to the fence and said it should be taken out.
“Why can’t I have the fence there if I want it?” Daingerfield protested. To which Inness replied:
“You can if you want to be an idiot.”
His criticism of older painters and pictures was just as unqualified. And in matters outside of art, where he spoke with no peculiar authority, his vehemence was no less. Crossing on theArizonain 1887, he talked every one out of the smoking-room on the Single Tax question, so a friend informs me. In 1894, when I happened to be crossing with him, he was as positive as ever about his religious, socialistic, and politicalconvictions. His interest and enthusiasm were in no degree abated. In the mornings he sat on deck wrapped up in rugs under the lee of a life-boat, and amused himself doing examples in vulgar fractions out of an ordinary school arithmetic; but in the afternoon he liked to talk, and I was a willing listener, though I had heard him discourse many times.
Every one remembers his caustic criticism of Turner’s “Slave Ship.” He always had a kick for Turner, though at heart he admired him, and in many respects his own methods were very like that master. They both worked from visual memory, Turner putting in what pleased him in architecture, people, and boats; and Inness putting in cows or bridges or wagons, as pleased him. Neither painter resorted to the model or to a sketch for these accessories. They painted them out of their heads, and sometimes they were vague in drawing or false in lighting. The only difference was that Turner took more liberties with his text than Inness, and often lost truth of tone. This gave Inness his chance to say that Turner was a painter of claptrap—his detail was spotty, he could paint figures in a boat, but he couldn’t paint a boat with figures.
For Gainsborough he had some admiration, and in his early days rather followed him, but he outgrew the brown-fiddle tone of Gainsborough’s foliage and came to think his work lackingin color. Constable, too, he admired, perhaps because he painted the greens of foliage very frankly; but his light and color were cold. Turner’s heat and Constable’s cold he did not believe could both come out of England, except through subjective distortion. The pictures of Watts, he insisted, looked as though dipped in a sewer, so unhealthy and morbid were they in color. This referred to the later pictures of Watts which Inness had seen in a loan collection exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum. He was fond of brilliant color himself, and evidently he had never studied the earlier and middle-period pictures of Watts. Wilson he liked, though recognizing that he was merely a reviser of the old classic formula of landscape. But Wilson knew how to handle his sky and could tie things together with atmosphere.
Corot was a very pretty painter—and by “pretty,” Inness meant clever. He wagged his head in saying it and smiled as though the statement were incontestable. The sentiment of light and air with Corot was something that Inness thoroughly understood. And he greatly fancied Corot’s composition. At one time he painted pictures that have a Corotesque arrangement—notably the “Wood Gatherers,” formerly in the Clarke Collection. What he did not understand was Corot’s monotony of color, or, as other painters expressed it, Corot’s refinement of color. Millet was wonderful, especially in his landscape-work,which had attracted so little attention. Delacroix was one of the great gods for his wonderful gamut of color, if nothing else. And so on.
The steamer trip in 1894 was the last one that Inness made. He died that summer at the Bridge of Allan in Scotland. His funeral was held in the National Academy of Design in New York, and the Swedenborgian minister who officiated, in the course of his eulogy, said: “Those of you who knew George Inness knew how intense a man he was.” “Intense” is exactly descriptive of the man. He was keyed up all his life and worked with feverish intensity. But the word does not describe his art, for that has no feeling of stress or strain about it. Sometimes one is conscious of its vagueness, as though the painter were groping a way out toward the light—a vagueness that holds the mystery of things half seen, a beautiful glimpse of half-revealed impressions. But usually his pictures are serene, hushed, and yet radiant with the glow of eternal sun-fires from sky or cloud.
They were lofty and poetic impressions, and the loftier they were the more intense the painter’s effort to reveal them. The heights of Parnassus are very calm, but they are not reached without a struggle. The great ones—those who scale the upper peaks—are perhaps the most intensive strugglers of all. Inness was one of them.