George Inness and the Visionary Landscape - Hardcover

Adrienne Baxter Bell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807615250 ISBN 13: 9780807615256

Publisher: George Braziller, 2003

Synopsis

George Inness and the Visionary Landscape includes forty color reproductions of Inness's most important paintings and presents both a chronological overview of Inness's life and a more focused treatment of the artist's main philosophical and religious preoccupations. Central to his thinking were the writings of the Swedish scientist-turned-visionary Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), who influenced many of Inness's contemporaries, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Walt Whitman. George Inness also suggests resonances between the artist's visionary landscapes and the concurrent efforts, on the part of the psychologist-philosopher William James (1842-1910), to validate the existence of mystical states of mind. It shows Inness to have anticipated many of the most important tenets of modernism, an achievement that continues to inspire contemporary audiences.

About this title

About the Author

Adrienne Baxter Bell served as Guest Curator for the exhibition George Inness and the Visionary Landscape (2003-2004).

Reviews

Inspired landscape painter George Inness (1825-94) was born in New York State's beautiful Hudson Valley and could easily have been part of the world-renowned Hudson River School. Instead, as Bell argues so persuasively in this rare, invaluable, and luminously illustrated monograph, Inness was far more concerned with metaphysics than with representational depictions of nature. Sojourns in Europe brought him into sympathy with the "emotionalism and painterly practices of the Barbizon School," Bell writes, but the most crucial influence on his later work was his immersion in the writings of Swedenborg, which inspired him to paint landscapes emblematic of the Swedenborgian vision of "spiritual influx," that is, the infusion of divinity into nature. Psychologist and philosopher William James also shaped Inness' meditative aesthetics with his vision of consciousness as a "stream of thought" and his observation of how mystical experiences "soften nature's outlines and open out the strangest possibilities and perspectives." The latter provides a perfect description for Inness' transcendent landscapes--gorgeous and radiant scenes that embody life's interconnectivity, mystery, timeless beauty, and untarnished hope. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: George Braziller
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807615250
• ISBN 13: 9780807615256
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176