1825 -1894 · American landscape, Barbizon, tonalism and Swedenborgian spirituality

Mists, storms, pines, evenings and almost dissolved landscapes make George Inness the great painter-philosopher of American nature in the 19th century.

George Inness was born near Newburgh, New York, in 1825 and grew up in Newark. His training was brief: a few lessons from John Jesse Barker then Régis François Gignoux, while his work in engraving allowed him to study Claude Lorrain, Salvator Rosa and ancient landscapers. He then discovered Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand, but quickly distinguished himself from the panoramic precision of the Hudson River School. His European travels played a decisive role. In Italy, he assimilated Claude's structures; In France and the Netherlands, the Barbizon and Hobbema school revealed to him the expressive power of ordinary sites, layers of paint and the atmosphere. Lackawanna Valley confronted the train, the felling of trees and the landscape in 1855, an image that had become central to debates on industrialization and the environment. In the 1860s, in Medfield, his touch was released and the plans were further merged. His conversion to the New Church in 1868 deepened the influence of Emanuel Swedenborg: for Inness, visible nature corresponded to a deeper spiritual reality. Evening in Medfield thus transformed a rural place into a state of light and contemplation. For Inness, visible nature corresponds to a deeper spiritual reality. Evening in Medfield thus transformed a rural place into a state of light and contemplation. The Pine Forest of Villa Barberini, painted after a long Italian stay, combines memory of the journey, verticality of the trees and atmospheric vibration. In The Storm or One coast, evening, shape, color and climate become vehicles of emotion rather than topographical description. Installed in Montclair from 1878, Inness perfected a synthetic way: erased contours, tiny figures, halos and colored masses suggest a reality that painting no longer claims to show entirely. He died in 1894 in Scotland. His corpus of more than one thousand one hundred and fifty paintings, watercolors and sketches made him one of the most prolific and deeply spiritual American landscapers. The "George Inness" selection notably compares Evening in Medfield and Pine Forest of Villa Barberini. His reading favors space.

Inness does not seek to copy a place: it blurs the form until the landscape becomes a correspondence between sensation, memory and spiritual life.