Volume 55, Number 14 · September 25, 2008
The Genius of George Inness
By Andrew Butterfield
Like Breath on Glass: Whistler, Inness, and the Art of Painting Softly
an exhibition at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, June 22–October 19, 2008.
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Marc Simpson
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute/Yale University Press, 267 pp., $65.00; $45.00 (paper)
George Inness: A Catalogue Raisonné
by Michael Quick
Rutgers University Press, two volumes; 1,140 pp., $400.00
George Inness: Writings and Reflections on Art and Philosophy
edited by Adrienne Baxter Bell
Braziller, 288 pp., $18.95 (paper)
George Inness and the Science of Landscape
by Rachael Ziady DeLue
University of Chicago Press, 317 pp., $35.00 (paper)
The works of George Inness, the American painter, have always provoked strong reactions and intense debate. Even at the height of his fame during the late nineteenth century, his landscape pictures disgusted some viewers, while moving others to rapturous praise. His critics called his paintings 'diseased' and 'perverted'; a reviewer in The New York Times in 1878 speculated that Inness might be insane. In the very same period, however, his fans—and there were many—lauded the 'remarkable originality' and 'depth of feeling' of the pictures. In their judgment, Inness was nothing less than the dean of American artists and one of the leading landscape painters in the world. For a time, Inness was both the most controversial and the most influential artist in the country.
Review, 3217 words
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