George Inness and the Visionary Landscape

Bell, Adrienne Baxter

ISBN 10: 1887149139 / ISBN 13: 9781887149136

Published by National Academy of Design, New York, 2005

About this Item

Small 4to, 174 pp.

Seller Inventory # 116184

Bibliographic Details

• Title: George Inness and the Visionary Landscape
• Publisher: National Academy of Design, New York
• Publication Date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1887149139
• ISBN 13: 9781887149136
• Binding: softcover
• Illustrator: Well-illustrated
• Edition: 1st.
• Condition: Fine copy
• Seller catalogs:
  • Art

About this title

Synopsis

The landscape painter George Inness (1825-1894) was one of the foremost American artists of his generation. Born in Newburgh, New York, Inness studied the works of the old masters and, as a young man, painted in the reigning style of the Hudson River School. Within a few years, however, he found himself more attuned to the gestural, expressive approach of the Barbizon School. He greatly admired the free handling of paint and the expression of soulfulness in the works of Theodore Rousseau.

Equally important were Inness's philosophical and spiritual concerns. Along with contemporaries Ralph Waldo Emerson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Walt Whitman, Inness studied the writings of the Swedish scientist-turned-mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). During a trip to Italy in the early 1870s, Inness began to structure his landscapes around geometric forms, a development that may have reflected the Swedenborgian idea that the natural world corresponds to the spiritual world and that geometric forms possess spiritual identities. Through these and other compositional devices, Inness created paintings to inspire an almost "religious experience" in his viewers.

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. It suggests resonances between Inness'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. 40 illustrations in color, 12 in black and white.

About the Author

Adrienne Baxter Bell, Ph.D., is the author of George Inness: Painting Philosophy and the editor of George Inness: Writings and Reflections on Art and Philosophy (Braziller, 2006). She served as Guest Curator for the exhibition George Inness and the Visionary Landscape (2003-04) and is an Associate Professor of Art History at Marymount Manhattan College, New York.