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. While in 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 the paysage intime to 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 New Jersey 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.
“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.”