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Lot Essay
Although Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand influenced George Inness, he pursued an entirely different path as a landscape painter. Inness went on to produce a body of work marked by a more subjective and ultimately more modern aesthetic than that of his contemporaries. The innovative brilliance of his art eventually brought him high acclaim--particularly for the later landscapes of which Summer Montclair of 1887, is a notable example.
In Summer, Montclair, Inness presents a pastoral scene with a village church spire on the horizon and stream and grazing cattle in the distance. The painting presents the countryside most favored by the artist: a "civilized landscape," in his own phrase, which over his long career provided subject matter for his most expressive works of art. According to Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., "Inness' civilized landscapes were modern paintings, legible signs of his affiliation with the modern present as against the mythologized past. The civilized landscape was nature shaped by the formative intelligence and creative power of mankind. It was the counterpart in reality of Inness' artistic determination to transform nature into art--to impress his artistic will on nature and use its materials for his own aesthetic and expressive ends--just as reapers, shepherdessess, woodcutters, and surveyors used and remade nature for human purposes." (N. Cikovsky, Jr. and M. Quick, George Inness, Los Angeles, California, 1985, p. 17)
Beginning in 1884, Inness was able to achieve a complete synthesis of his innovative formal means and his goal of poetic expression. The central component of this synthesis was color, which he described as 'the soul of a painting.' Forms, on the other hand, though still based in the observation of nature, were softened by atmosphere and dissolved by light. Inness relished in capturing the colors of dawn, dusk, twilight, moonlight, the colors of all seasons and of all hours of the day. However, unlike the Impressionist painter Monet, Inness did not focus on the implied optical effects of motion or action, he instead created a dreamy stillness giving a sense of calmness.
This painting will be included in Michael Quick's forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist work.
In Summer, Montclair, Inness presents a pastoral scene with a village church spire on the horizon and stream and grazing cattle in the distance. The painting presents the countryside most favored by the artist: a "civilized landscape," in his own phrase, which over his long career provided subject matter for his most expressive works of art. According to Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., "Inness' civilized landscapes were modern paintings, legible signs of his affiliation with the modern present as against the mythologized past. The civilized landscape was nature shaped by the formative intelligence and creative power of mankind. It was the counterpart in reality of Inness' artistic determination to transform nature into art--to impress his artistic will on nature and use its materials for his own aesthetic and expressive ends--just as reapers, shepherdessess, woodcutters, and surveyors used and remade nature for human purposes." (N. Cikovsky, Jr. and M. Quick, George Inness, Los Angeles, California, 1985, p. 17)
Beginning in 1884, Inness was able to achieve a complete synthesis of his innovative formal means and his goal of poetic expression. The central component of this synthesis was color, which he described as 'the soul of a painting.' Forms, on the other hand, though still based in the observation of nature, were softened by atmosphere and dissolved by light. Inness relished in capturing the colors of dawn, dusk, twilight, moonlight, the colors of all seasons and of all hours of the day. However, unlike the Impressionist painter Monet, Inness did not focus on the implied optical effects of motion or action, he instead created a dreamy stillness giving a sense of calmness.
This painting will be included in Michael Quick's forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist work.