Inness George oil painting artist, old paintings America

George Inness
American painter
born 1825 - died 1894

Also known as: George Innes, Georges Inness Jr..

Student of: Régis François Gignoux (1816-1882).
Teacher of: Elliott Daingerfield (1859-1932), Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933), Carleton Wiggins (1848-1932).
Father of: George Inness II (1853-1926).
Father-in-law of: Jonathan Scott Hartley (1845-1912).
Grandfather of: Rachel Hartley (1884-1955).

INNESS, George, landscape-painter, born in New-burg, New York, 1 May, 1825. His parents removed to Newark, New Jersey, where George Inness early learned drawing and the rudiments of oil-painting. George Inness has from his youth been subject to epilepsy, which has interfered materially with the consecutive pursuit of his art. When sixteen years old George Inness went to New York to study engraving, but ill health obliged him to return home, where George Inness continued to sketch and paint. When twenty years of age George Inness passed a month in the studio of Regis Gignoux in New York city, which is all the regular instruction George Inness ever had. George Inness then began landscape-painting in New York city, made two visits to Europe, and lived in Florence and Rome for some time. For several years after his return George Inness made his home near Boston, where some of his best pictures were painted. In 1862 George Inness went to reside at Eagleswood, near Perth Amboy, New Jersey, and a few years later removed to New York city. George Inness was chosen a National academician in 1868. From 1871 to 1875 George Inness again resided in Italy. The art life of Inness is marked by two distinct styles, the first indicating careful finish and conscientious regard for details. The second style, formed with the expanding grasp of the principles of art, shows a richer appreciation of the truths of nature, is broad and vigorous, paying higher regard to masses than to details. The quality of his paintings is very uneven, as George Inness is sometimes careless, and often mars a good work by eccentric and experimental devices. Yet no painter has represented the aspects of nature in the American climate with deeper feeling, a finer sentiment of light and color, or a better command of technical resources. George Inness has been more influenced by the French school of landscape-painting than any other American artist, yet his style is distinct and original. George Inness is a follower of Swedenborg, and many of his paintings have a spiritual or allegorical significance. Among his best pictures are "The Sign of Promise," "Peace and Plenty," "Going out of the Woods," " A Vision of Faith," "The Valley of the Shadow of Death," "The Apocalyptic Vision of the New Jerusalem and River of Life," "A Passing Storm," "Summer Sunshine and Shadow," "Summer Afternoon," "Twilight," "Light Triumphant," "Pine Grove," "Barbarini Villa," "Joy after the Storm," " Viewnear Rome," "Washing Day near Perugia," "The Mountain Stream," "Autumn," "Italian Landscape," "Passing Clouds," " The Afterglow," "The Morning Sun," and "Delaware Water-Gap." His "American Sunset " was selected as a representative work of American art for the Paris exposition of 1867. In 1878 George Inness exhibited at the Paris exposition "St. Peter's, Rome, from the Tiber" and " View near Medfield, Massachusetts," and in the National academy" An Old Roadway, Long Island." In 1882 George Inness exhibited at the academy exhibition in New York city "Under the Green Wood"; in 1883, "A Summer Morning ": in 1885, "A Sunset" and "A Day in June" :" in 1886, "In the Woods," "Sunset on the Sea-Shore," and "Durham Meadows."--His son, George, artist, born in Paris, France, 5 January, 1854, was in 1870-'4 a pupil of his father in Rome, and of Bonnat in Paris in 1875. George Inness resided in Boston, Massachusetts, till 1878, then occupied a studio with his father in New York city, devoted himself to animal painting, beginning to exhibit at the National academy in 1877. For many years his residence and studio have been in Montclair, New Jersey His style is dashing and forcible. Among his works are "The Ford" and "Patience," exhibited in 1877; "At the Brook," and "The Pride of the Dairy," sent to the academy in 1878; "Pasture at Chemung"; "Monarch of the Herd"; "Returning to Work" (1886); and "After the Combat," and "A Mild Day" (1887).

The American artist George Inness (1825-1894) was primarily a landscape painter, who developed a personal, subjective form of impressionism.

George Inness was born May 1, 1825, near Newburg, N.Y. His family moved in 1829 to Newark, N.J., where Inness was educated and took painting and drawing lessons. In 1841 George Inness worked as a map engraver for a New York firm. George Inness soon gave this up to sketch direct from nature. At the age of 18 George Inness married Delia Miller, who died a few months later. In 1844 George Inness exhibited at the National Academy of Design, and the next year George Inness studied briefly with Régis Gignoux. Inness's earliest pictures show the influence of 17th-century masters such as Claude Lorrain, Gaspard Dughet, and Meindert Hobemma.

In 1847 Inness spent a short time in England and Italy. Three years later George Inness married Elizabeth Hart and spent another 2 years studying and painting in Florence. On returning to New York, George Inness was elected an associate member of the National Academy. Again George Inness returned to Europe, this time to France. Exposure to Camille Corot and the painters of the Barbizon school had a profound effect on Inness's work after 1855. One of his best pictures from this period is the Lackawanna Valley (1855), which shows his new breadth of light and atmosphere as well as an openness of composition and a freshness in the handling of paint.- Inness George oil painting artist, old paintings America - Inness George - America old oil painting artist, old oil paintings artist Inness George Bio of old oil painting artists, America oil paintings artist Inness George paintings.

On his return from France, Inness settled in Medfield, Mass., which became the setting for a number of oils painted during the next 5 years.

In the early 1860s George Inness painted in the Adirondacks, Catskills, and Berkshires and also in New Hampshire. George Inness was now in control of his new style, one that allowed him to convey "that subjective mystery of nature with which wherever I went I was filled." Especially appealing were the contrasting moods of nature--sunrise and sunset, calm and storm.

About 1865 Inness met the painter William Page, who introduced him to the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg. A combination of science and religious mysticism, Swedenborgianism provided Inness with a philosophical basis for his art. Inness was in Rome from 1870 to 1872 and in France for the next 2 years. During this period of travel George Inness systematically refined his manner of composing, use of color, and handling of brushwork, making each as effectively expressive as possible. Many of his Italian paintings have a distinctive decorative flatness and elegant juxtaposition of silhouettes, notably The Monk (1873).

In 1875 Inness returned to New York and 3 years later moved to Montclair, N.J., where George Inness painted for most of the rest of his life. His later paintings reveal an increasingly careful sense of design: George Inness mostly relied on dividing his landscapes into foreground and background, with the former subdivided diagonally into approximate halves. Generally, figures and trees are clearly situated within one plane, so that no details are distracting and all design components are harmoniously unified. A typical example is the Coming Storm (1878).

Inness spent the summers of the 1880s variously in Connecticut, Nantucket, Mass., and upstate New York. At the end of the decade George Inness traveled to the western and southern United States, Mexico, and Cuba and in the early 1890s to Florida, California, and Canada. His late work is much more subjective and impressionistic, the landscapes appearing less as specific places and more as hazy memory images. In 1894 George Inness visited Paris, Baden, and Munich. George Inness then went to Scotland, where George Inness died suddenly at the little town of Bridge-of-Allan on August 3.

"George Inness, born near Newburgh, New York, was the fifth of thirteen children. His father, a prosperous grocer, tried to make a grocer out of him, but the youth decided instead to become an artist. Around 1841, George Inness received a month's instruction from John Jesse Barker, a painter living in Newark, New Jersey, where the Inness family had moved in 1829. From the age of sixteen, Inness served a two-year apprenticeship as an engraver with the New York mapmaking firm of Sherman and Smith. George Inness took some instruction in painting from Régis Gignoux about 1843, around the time George Inness was studying and being influenced by prints of the paintings of Claude Lorrain and the seventeenth-century Dutch landscape masters. George Inness was also seeing the work of the leading Hudson River School painters - particularly that of Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand - whose style is recalled in some of his early canvases.- Inness George oil painting artist, old paintings America - Inness George - America old oil painting artist, old oil paintings artist Inness George Bio of old oil painting artists, America oil paintings artist Inness George paintings.

"Inness exhibited for the first time at the National Academy of Design in 1844 and continued to exhibit there almost every year until the end of his life. Though George Inness was elected an Associate of the Academy in 1853, George Inness was not made an Academician until 1868. George Inness was one of the important early members of the Society of American Artists, an exhibition organization founded in 1877 to challenge the conservative policies of the Academy.

"By the late 1840s, Inness was exhibiting regularly in New York and had attracted a patron, Ogden Haggerty. Inness married Elizabeth Hart in 1850, and the following February the couple departed for a fifteen-month stay in Italy made possible by Haggerry's financial support. On their way home, they stopped in Paris, where Inness visited an exhibition that included work by the Barbizon painter Théodore Rousseau; after a second trip abroad, in 1853-54, the work of Rousseau and other Barbizon painters exerted a strong influence on Inness's art.

"Inness and his family left New York in 1860, moving first to Medfield, Massachusetts, and later to an estate near Perth Amboy, New Jersey. In the early 1860s, fellow artist William Page introduced Inness to the theories of Emanuel Swedenborg, which made a deep and lasting impression on him; indeed, became a major force in his intellectual life. Throughout that decade, spent in rural surroundings, George Inness sought to make his paintings convey the profound spiritual meaning George Inness felt the landscape around him possessed.

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