he work of the 1860s and 1870s often tended toward the panoramic and
picturesque, topped by cloud-laden and threatening skies, and included
views of his native country (Autumn Oaks, 1878, Metropolitan Museum of
Art; Catskill Mountains, 1870, Art Institute of Chicago), as well as
scenes inspired by numerous travels overseas, especially to Italy and
France (The Monk, 1873, Addison Gallery of American Art; Etretat, 1875,
Wadsworth Atheneum). In terms of composition, precision of drawing, and
the emotive use of color, these paintings placed Inness among the best
and most successful landscape painters in America.
Eventually Inness\' art evidenced the influence of the theology of
Emanuel Swedenborg. Of particular interest to Inness was the notion
that everything in nature had a correspondential relationship with
something spiritual and so received an \"influx\" from God in order to
continually exist.
Another influence upon Inness\' thinking was William James, also an
adherent to Swedenborgianism. In particular, Inness was inspired by
James\' idea of consciousness as a \"stream of thought\", as well as
his ideas concerning how mystical experience shapes one\'s perspective
toward nature.
After Inness settled in Montclair, New Jersey in 1878, and particularly
in the last decade of his life, this mystical component manifested in
his art through a more abstracted handling of shapes, softened edges,
and saturated color (October, 1886, Los Angeles County Museum of Art),
a profound and dramatic juxtaposition of sky and earth (Early Autumn,
Montclair, 1888, Montclair Art Museum), an emphasis on the intimate
landscape view (Sunset in the Woods, 1891, Corcoran Gallery of Art),
and an increasingly personal, spontaneous, and often violent handling
of paint.
It is this last quality in particular which distinguishes Inness from
those painters of like sympathies who are characterized as Luminists.
In a published interview, Inness maintained that \"The true use of art
is, first, to cultivate the artist\'s own spiritual nature.\" His
abiding interest in spiritual and emotional considerations did not
preclude Inness from undertaking a scientific study of color, nor a
mathematical, structural approach to composition: \"The poetic quality
is not obtained by eschewing any truths of fact or of Nature...Poetry
is the vision of reality.\"
Inness died while in Scotland in 1894. According to his son, he was
viewing the sunset, when he threw up his hands into the air and
exclaimed, \"My God! oh, how beautiful!\", fell to the ground, and died
minutes later.
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