AMERICAN LANDSCAPE PAINTERSGeorge Inness
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George Inness is said to have painted more good pictures than anyone else ever painted. At any rate, he painted more than he himself could remember. A landscape supposed to be Inness’s was brought by the man who owned it to the artist’s studio, with a request to know if it was genuine. Inness looked at the painting carefully for a long time. “Leave it, leave it,” he finally said. “Perhaps I shall recall it.”
Inness spent the greater part of a long career in the neighborhood of New York. He began studying at the age of fourteen. He received very little instruction; but for the most part found out through his own hard work and drudgery all that a painter must know about drawing, colors, and the mechanical side of art. Then, during a few years in Italy, the glorious landscapes, the historic traditions, the art of old masters, all combined to develop in the artist, who was then but a young man, that quality of imagination which was needed to make him a genius.
Yet neither his knowledge of art nor his imagination could have placed him foremost among painters of American landscape had it not been for the energy that was above all characteristic of his nature. Inness would often work fifteen hours at a stretch. Friends wondered at his endurance, and even more at the speed with which he painted. He saw one day two pictures by Rousseau, the famous French artist, and remarked to a friend, “I could paint two of those a day.” Next day, to prove his point, Inness painted two canvases in the French style, and later sold them both to one man.
An incident that happened at Montclair, New Jersey, shows how little he valued his own finished work. When out walking one day he was overtaken by a thunderstorm, and was so impressed with its fury and grandeur that he rushed home to paint it while the memory was still fresh. Arrived at the house, and unable to find a canvas large enough for his idea, he took down a ten-foot picture of Mount Washington which he had painted years before. In two hours the mountain scene was replaced by a striking representation of the storm just over. That picture, with the outline of Mount Washington still traceable by ridges of paint, now hangs in the museum at St. Louis.
Men of great energy often wear themselves out early in life; yet George Inness kept on painting to a good ripe age. At sixty-nine he died in Scotland, where he had gone for his health.
PREPARED BY THE EDITORIAL STAFF OF THE MENTOR ASSOCIATIONILLUSTRATION FOR THE MENTOR, VOL. 1, No. 26, SERIAL No. 26
VIEW ON THE SEINE By HOMER MARTINMetropolitan Museum of Art
VIEW ON THE SEINE By HOMER MARTIN
Metropolitan Museum of Art