
George Inness Painting Reproductions 7 of 9
1825-1894
American Romanticism Painter
George Inness occupies a singular place in American art - a painter who, across a career of more than four decades, refused to be contained by the descriptive exactitude of the Hudson River School or by the incandescent shimmer that would later mark Impressionism. Instead he pursued an elusive equilibrium between observation and evocation, convinced that landscape might speak both of earthbound fact and of metaphysical truth.
Born on 1 May 1825 in Newburgh, New York, the fifth of thirteen children, Inness spent his formative years in bustling Newark, New Jersey, where a brief apprenticeship to a map engraver sharpened his eye for structure while encouraging a dislike of the purely mechanical. Lessons with the French émigré Régis François Gignoux and evenings at the National Academy of Design acquainted him with the rhetorical grandeur of Thomas Cole and the calm lucidity of Asher Durand - models he would later splice rather than merely imitate.
A first European sojourn in 1851, financed by the patron Ogden Haggerty, placed Inness before the orderly pastorals of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. Their measured harmonies impressed him less as formulae than as prompts: classical balance might, he sensed, conceal currents of feeling not immediately visible. Exposure to the Barbizon painters at mid-century reinforced that intuition. From Corot he absorbed the hush of twilight; from Daubigny the tactility of paint itself. By the time he returned to New York in the mid-1850s, he was recognised as the foremost American exponent of Barbizon tonalities, yet his ambition lay beyond stylistic allegiance.
The commission for The Lackawanna Valley around 1855 dramatised an early tension that would haunt his art: the locomotive arches across the foreground, smoke dissolving into cloud, while a boy surveys the scene from a grassy knoll. The image acknowledges technological prowess yet permits nature the last word, the grey plume merging with weather rather than conquering it. Even here, Inness’s brush modulates between crisp contour and atmospheric blur, hinting at the unseen energies he would later explore more fully.
That exploration deepened after his encounter with the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, whose vision of a universe permeated by spiritual correspondences resonated with Inness’s instinctive pantheism. From the late 1870s his canvases pursue not topographical fidelity but an intimation of what he called “the reality of the unseen”. Forms soften, edges dissolve, tonal transitions thicken like half-remembered melodies. Early Morning - Tarpon Springs (c. 1877) presents Floridian pines as columns through which light filters in silent cadences, the subtropical rendered northern by mood rather than by botany.
Settling in Montclair, New Jersey in 1885, Inness intensified this idiom. October (1886) or Early Autumn, Montclair (1888) proceed by chromatic murmurs: russet, olive, tawny gold, each value calibrated to nudge the eye from surface sensation toward inward reflection. Technique grows freer, at times almost abrupt, yet the underlying architecture remains rigorously plotted. Such canvases remind us that for Inness the scientific study of colour and the mathematical poise of composition were not counters to poetry but its indispensable armature.
Critical esteem kept pace. Elected a full Academician in 1868, he garnered a gold medal at the Paris Exposition of 1889, and in 1884 a retrospective organised by the American Art Association confirmed his stature at home. Yet honours meant less to him than the daily wrestle with pigment and idea. “The true use of art,” he wrote, “is to cultivate the artist’s own spiritual nature” - a statement that turns biography into credo.
Inness died on 3 August 1894 at Bridge of Allan in Scotland, collapsing after exclaiming at the splendour of a sunset - an end uncannily consonant with his life’s pursuit. His burial in Montclair closed a circle: the town whose vistas he had translated into meditations now shelters his remains. Today the Montclair Art Museum’s dedicated gallery attests to a legacy that is both regional and international. To view his late paintings is to experience an art poised between material immediacy and ineffable depth, an art that invites contemplation long after the eye has registered its gentle radiance.
Inness’s achievement lies not in any single manifesto but in a sustained attempt to align painting with the rhythms of perception and belief. He stands, therefore, as a pivotal figure: a witness to America’s industrial ascent, a student of European tradition, and, above all, a seeker who transcribed into paint the mutable dialogue between the visible world and the mysteries it shelters.
Born on 1 May 1825 in Newburgh, New York, the fifth of thirteen children, Inness spent his formative years in bustling Newark, New Jersey, where a brief apprenticeship to a map engraver sharpened his eye for structure while encouraging a dislike of the purely mechanical. Lessons with the French émigré Régis François Gignoux and evenings at the National Academy of Design acquainted him with the rhetorical grandeur of Thomas Cole and the calm lucidity of Asher Durand - models he would later splice rather than merely imitate.
A first European sojourn in 1851, financed by the patron Ogden Haggerty, placed Inness before the orderly pastorals of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. Their measured harmonies impressed him less as formulae than as prompts: classical balance might, he sensed, conceal currents of feeling not immediately visible. Exposure to the Barbizon painters at mid-century reinforced that intuition. From Corot he absorbed the hush of twilight; from Daubigny the tactility of paint itself. By the time he returned to New York in the mid-1850s, he was recognised as the foremost American exponent of Barbizon tonalities, yet his ambition lay beyond stylistic allegiance.
The commission for The Lackawanna Valley around 1855 dramatised an early tension that would haunt his art: the locomotive arches across the foreground, smoke dissolving into cloud, while a boy surveys the scene from a grassy knoll. The image acknowledges technological prowess yet permits nature the last word, the grey plume merging with weather rather than conquering it. Even here, Inness’s brush modulates between crisp contour and atmospheric blur, hinting at the unseen energies he would later explore more fully.
That exploration deepened after his encounter with the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, whose vision of a universe permeated by spiritual correspondences resonated with Inness’s instinctive pantheism. From the late 1870s his canvases pursue not topographical fidelity but an intimation of what he called “the reality of the unseen”. Forms soften, edges dissolve, tonal transitions thicken like half-remembered melodies. Early Morning - Tarpon Springs (c. 1877) presents Floridian pines as columns through which light filters in silent cadences, the subtropical rendered northern by mood rather than by botany.
Settling in Montclair, New Jersey in 1885, Inness intensified this idiom. October (1886) or Early Autumn, Montclair (1888) proceed by chromatic murmurs: russet, olive, tawny gold, each value calibrated to nudge the eye from surface sensation toward inward reflection. Technique grows freer, at times almost abrupt, yet the underlying architecture remains rigorously plotted. Such canvases remind us that for Inness the scientific study of colour and the mathematical poise of composition were not counters to poetry but its indispensable armature.
Critical esteem kept pace. Elected a full Academician in 1868, he garnered a gold medal at the Paris Exposition of 1889, and in 1884 a retrospective organised by the American Art Association confirmed his stature at home. Yet honours meant less to him than the daily wrestle with pigment and idea. “The true use of art,” he wrote, “is to cultivate the artist’s own spiritual nature” - a statement that turns biography into credo.
Inness died on 3 August 1894 at Bridge of Allan in Scotland, collapsing after exclaiming at the splendour of a sunset - an end uncannily consonant with his life’s pursuit. His burial in Montclair closed a circle: the town whose vistas he had translated into meditations now shelters his remains. Today the Montclair Art Museum’s dedicated gallery attests to a legacy that is both regional and international. To view his late paintings is to experience an art poised between material immediacy and ineffable depth, an art that invites contemplation long after the eye has registered its gentle radiance.
Inness’s achievement lies not in any single manifesto but in a sustained attempt to align painting with the rhythms of perception and belief. He stands, therefore, as a pivotal figure: a witness to America’s industrial ascent, a student of European tradition, and, above all, a seeker who transcribed into paint the mutable dialogue between the visible world and the mysteries it shelters.
195 George Inness Paintings

Hackensack Meadows, Sunset 1859
Oil Painting
$581
$581
Canvas Print
$56.20
$56.20
SKU: ING-9227
George Inness
Original Size: 46 x 66 cm
Historical Society, New York, USA
George Inness
Original Size: 46 x 66 cm
Historical Society, New York, USA

The Coming Storm c.1879
Oil Painting
$666
$666
Canvas Print
$89.36
$89.36
SKU: ING-9228
George Inness
Original Size: 69.2 x 106 cm
Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, USA
George Inness
Original Size: 69.2 x 106 cm
Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, USA

Etretat n.d.
Oil Painting
$576
$576
Canvas Print
$85.82
$85.82
SKU: ING-9229
George Inness
Original Size: 45.7 x 66.7 cm
Private Collection
George Inness
Original Size: 45.7 x 66.7 cm
Private Collection

Albano, Italy n.d.
Oil Painting
$470
$470
Canvas Print
$56.20
$56.20
SKU: ING-9230
George Inness
Original Size: 26.7 x 41.3 cm
Private Collection
George Inness
Original Size: 26.7 x 41.3 cm
Private Collection

Sunset on the River 1867
Oil Painting
$807
$807
Canvas Print
$56.84
$56.84
SKU: ING-9231
George Inness
Original Size: 77.5 x 115.6 cm
Private Collection
George Inness
Original Size: 77.5 x 115.6 cm
Private Collection

Slow Fading Day 1880
Oil Painting
$544
$544
SKU: ING-10550
George Inness
Original Size: 30.4 x 45.7 cm
Private Collection
George Inness
Original Size: 30.4 x 45.7 cm
Private Collection

Shepherd in a Landscape c.1875
Oil Painting
$561
$561
SKU: ING-10551
George Inness
Original Size: 30.4 x 45.7 cm
Private Collection
George Inness
Original Size: 30.4 x 45.7 cm
Private Collection

Sunset on a Meadow 1878
Oil Painting
$616
$616
SKU: ING-10552
George Inness
Original Size: 40.6 x 61 cm
Private Collection
George Inness
Original Size: 40.6 x 61 cm
Private Collection

Sunset, Montclair 1892
Oil Painting
$652
$652
Canvas Print
$56.20
$56.20
SKU: ING-12197
George Inness
Original Size: 76.2 x 114.3 cm
Private Collection
George Inness
Original Size: 76.2 x 114.3 cm
Private Collection

Medfield, Massachusetts n.d.
Oil Painting
$550
$550
Canvas Print
$56.20
$56.20
SKU: ING-12198
George Inness
Original Size: unknown
Private Collection
George Inness
Original Size: unknown
Private Collection

Across the Hudson Valley in the Foothills of the ... 1868
Oil Painting
$535
$535
Canvas Print
$70.80
$70.80
SKU: ING-12199
George Inness
Original Size: 38.1 x 66 cm
Private Collection
George Inness
Original Size: 38.1 x 66 cm
Private Collection

The Sun 1886
Oil Painting
$504
$504
Canvas Print
$78.49
$78.49
SKU: ING-12200
George Inness
Original Size: unknown
Private Collection
George Inness
Original Size: unknown
Private Collection

Monte Lucia, Perugia 1873
Oil Painting
$493
$493
Canvas Print
$56.20
$56.20
SKU: ING-12201
George Inness
Original Size: 35.3 x 50 cm
Private Collection
George Inness
Original Size: 35.3 x 50 cm
Private Collection

The Rainbow in the Berkshire Hills 1869
Oil Painting
$672
$672
Canvas Print
$68.70
$68.70
SKU: ING-12202
George Inness
Original Size: 50.8 x 76.2 cm
White House Museum, Washington, USA
George Inness
Original Size: 50.8 x 76.2 cm
White House Museum, Washington, USA

Midsummer 1892
Oil Painting
$652
$652
Canvas Print
$56.20
$56.20
SKU: ING-12204
George Inness
Original Size: 76.2 x 114.9 cm
Private Collection
George Inness
Original Size: 76.2 x 114.9 cm
Private Collection

Moonlight, Tarpon Springs 1892
Oil Painting
$673
$673
Canvas Print
$56.20
$56.20
SKU: ING-12205
George Inness
Original Size: 76.2 x 115.5 cm
Phillips Collection, Washington, USA
George Inness
Original Size: 76.2 x 115.5 cm
Phillips Collection, Washington, USA

Grey day, Goochland 1884
Oil Painting
$446
$446
Canvas Print
$62.10
$62.10
SKU: ING-12241
George Inness
Original Size: 45.7 x 61 cm
Phillips Collection, Washington, USA
George Inness
Original Size: 45.7 x 61 cm
Phillips Collection, Washington, USA

The Monk 1873
Oil Painting
$695
$695
Canvas Print
$56.20
$56.20
SKU: ING-12242
George Inness
Original Size: 97.8 x 163.8 cm
Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, USA
George Inness
Original Size: 97.8 x 163.8 cm
Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, USA

In the Roman Campagna 1873
Oil Painting
$839
$839
Canvas Print
$63.21
$63.21
SKU: ING-12243
George Inness
Original Size: 66 x 109.2 cm
Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri, USA
George Inness
Original Size: 66 x 109.2 cm
Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri, USA

Harvest Moon 1891
Oil Painting
$672
$672
Canvas Print
$56.99
$56.99
SKU: ING-12244
George Inness
Original Size: 76.2 x 113 cm
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, USA
George Inness
Original Size: 76.2 x 113 cm
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, USA

Landscape 1877
Oil Painting
$734
$734
Canvas Print
$93.56
$93.56
SKU: ING-12245
George Inness
Original Size: 65 x 97.8 cm
Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, USA
George Inness
Original Size: 65 x 97.8 cm
Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, USA

Gulf of Mexico, Florida 1894
Oil Painting
$640
$640
Canvas Print
$94.35
$94.35
SKU: ING-12246
George Inness
Original Size: 61 x 91.4 cm
Colby College Museum of Art, Maine, USA
George Inness
Original Size: 61 x 91.4 cm
Colby College Museum of Art, Maine, USA

Summer Evening, Montclair, New Jersey 1892
Oil Painting
$721
$721
Canvas Print
$92.96
$92.96
SKU: ING-12247
George Inness
Original Size: 76.2 x 114.3 cm
Colby College Museum of Art, Maine, USA
George Inness
Original Size: 76.2 x 114.3 cm
Colby College Museum of Art, Maine, USA

Winter Evening, Medfield n.d.
Oil Painting
$539
$539
Canvas Print
$56.20
$56.20
SKU: ING-12248
George Inness
Original Size: 25.4 x 40.6 cm
Colby College Museum of Art, Maine, USA
George Inness
Original Size: 25.4 x 40.6 cm
Colby College Museum of Art, Maine, USA