Peace and Plenty

George Inness started as a Hudson River painter and spent forty years moving away from it. The early canvases are detailed and topographic. The late ones dissolve: trees become masses, edges go soft, and colour carries more of the weight than drawing does. Swedenborg’s writings shaped that shift. Inness believed landscape could carry spiritual meaning directly, and stopped trying to describe places in favour of registering their feeling. He called the detail in his earlier work a distraction. He painted in Italy, France and Massachusetts, and settled eventually in Montclair, New Jersey, which supplied most of the late subjects. Those pictures, painted in the 1880s and 1890s, are where his reputation now rests. They influenced American Tonalism directly and look, in places, like they are heading toward abstraction without quite intending to.