George Inness

George Inness was born May 1, 1825, in Newburgh, New York, and grew up largely in Newark, New Jersey, where he received minimal formal schooling. His art education began informally: in 1839, around age fourteen, he studied for several months with the itinerant painter John Jesse Barker. As a teenager he worked as a map engraver in New York City, first at Sherman and Smith and then at N. Currier, and used the time to study the landscapes of Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, and Old Masters such as Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa.

In the mid-1840s Inness attended classes at the National Academy of Design in New York under the French landscape painter Regis Francois Gignoux, and exhibited there for the first time in 1844. In 1851, the patron Ogden Haggerty funded a European trip; Inness spent about fifteen months in Rome studying Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, returning to America in May 1852. In Rome he rented a studio above the painter William Page, who is thought to have introduced him to the theology of Emanuel Swedenborg, an influence that shaped the more visionary character of his later work. Further trips to Paris exposed him to the Barbizon school, and visits to London and Amsterdam brought him into contact with Dutch landscape painting, including the work of Meyndert Hobbema. He was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design in 1853 and a full Academician in 1868. In the fall of 1863 he taught drawing at Eagleswood Military Academy in New Jersey.

Inness continued to paint prolifically through the 1880s and early 1890s, moving toward increasingly abstract, tonal, and spiritually inflected landscapes. He died on August 3, 1894, in Bridge of Allan, Scotland, while traveling, at age sixty-nine. He was widely regarded at the time of his death as the leading American landscape painter of his generation.

Inness has long been treated by critics and historians as one of the pivotal figures in American landscape painting, credited by some with helping to define the country's Tonalist sensibility and, in the words of specialist commentary, regarded by some as the father of American landscape painting. Reviewing the 2003 exhibition George Inness and the Visionary Landscape at the National Academy of Design, critic Mario Naves praised the show in The New York Observer, crediting Inness's debt to Corot and the Barbizon school while arguing that he transformed those influences into a distinctly forceful, concrete American idiom. Museum retrospectives, from a 1974 University of Texas Art Museum exhibition to the Montclair Art Museum's ongoing dedicated Inness gallery, have consistently reinforced his standing as a major figure whose late work anticipated more abstract and spiritually oriented American painting.

George Inness's highest confirmed auction result is Sunset on the River, which sold for USD 1,945,000 at Christie's New York on May 21, 2008. A separate result of USD 262,900 for Near Leeds, New York at Heritage Auctions in Dallas in 2009 is that house's own top price for the artist, well below the overall record. His market is that of a historically significant but comparatively thin nineteenth-century American painting category, with results driven by American art specialists at auction houses and dealers rather than the primary-market mechanics of a living artist. Because he died in 1894, there is no gallery or estate representation in the contemporary sense; works move almost entirely on the secondary market.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for George Inness, and no formal estate or gallery structure comparable to what exists for living artists; attribution relies on museum curatorial expertise, specialist auction house departments, and dealers such as Lincoln Glenn. Buyers should also be careful to distinguish his work from that of his son, George Inness Jr., since the two names, along with spelling variants such as "Innes," appear closely together in market records. His reputation is strongly institutional, anchored by the dedicated Inness gallery at the Montclair Art Museum and holdings at the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum, and other major collections, even though his auction market itself remains comparatively modest and thinly traded relative to that stature.