George Inness - Oil Painting Reproductions

All oil paintings of George Inness (19 Century, American, Tonalism) will be hand painted by our professional artists. Let HandmadePiece help you bring better museum quality art reproductions of George Inness to home. Photo preview of the finished art will be offered before delivery, global free shipping.

1825 - 1894 • American • Painter • Barbizon Influence/Impressionistic

"I love [the civilized landscape] and think it more worthy of reproduction than that which is savage and untamed. It is more significant. Every act of man, everything of labor, effort, suffering, want, anxiety, necessity, love, marks itself wherever it has been ... everything in nature has something to say to us." - George Inness

In the beginning of his long career, George Inness painted in the scrupulous, tight, detailed style of the HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL and composed pictures with attention to the classical Claudian conventions (see CLAUDE LORRAIN). Specificity in his early landscapes allowed the viewer to recognize a particular bend in the river, grazing cattle, the settlement in the distance, a roundhouse, and even the lettering on the engine of a train, as in The Lackawanna Valley (1855), commissioned by a railroad company. This painting, now canonical, was rediscovered by Inness himself, many years after he had painted it, in a junk shop in Mexico City. He painted the civilized landscape rather than the wilderness, and his pictures might seem to celebrate industry and progress, yet they also seem to have a certain wistful or nostalgic ambiguity, seen in details such as the figures of small poets contemplating the trees that have been felled, and a covered wagon trundling along in the wake of the locomotive. Or in Delaware Water Gap (1861), on the eve of the Civil War, the broken rainbow may be read as a symbol of the imminent break between North and South. His travels in France acquainted Inness with the BARBIZON SCHOOL. Its influence loosened his visual approach and his brushstroke, softening color and contour. Born in New Jersey, Inness was frail, epileptic, reclusive, melancholic, and volatile. In the mid-1860s, he became a follower of the 18th-century mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, and his landscapes seem increasingly to be filtered through the dematerialized spiritual world in which he was immersed. While his scenes of this era, such as Home at Montclair (1892), may appear impressionistic in a general sense of the word, he had no tolerance for the movement: "Impressionism is the sloth enwrapped in its own eternal dullness," he wrote. Recognition did not come until Inness reached his 50s. He was a transitional figure whose life was divided by the Civil War and whose work was a bridge between the old and the avant-garde.