The Berkshires as muse

Magazine Antiques, March, 2005 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

Berkshire County in western Massachusetts is one of the most visually captivating regions of New England. Nearly equidistant from New York City and Boston, it was discovered in the nineteenth century by affluent residents of those cities and by artists, writers, and musicians who were drawn to the quiet beauty of the scenery and the fellowship of like-minded individuals who had settled there permanently or came for the summer.

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A small, tightly focused exhibition on view at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, examines how the Berkshires inspired the American landscape painter George Inness, who traveled there in the summer and autumn between the 1840s and the 1870s. Inness is known to have executed some thirty paintings of the Berkshires, nearly a dozen of which comprise A Walk in the Country: Inness and the Berkshires, an exhibition on view at the Clark Art Institute until April 17. The paintings are accompanied by photographs, letters, and other documents pertaining to both the artist and his patrons in the Berkshires.

Inness found the surroundings to be an inspirational springboard, but his landscapes are rarely exact depictions of what he saw. The sketches he made on the spot were merely a point of departure for his oil paintings, which he created in the studio.

The artist enjoyed the generosity of four patrons who summered or lived full time in the Berkshires. Chief among them when Inness was embarking on his career was Ogden Haggerty, a wealthy New York businessman who owned a summer retreat in Lenox called Vent Fort. He was Inness's first patron and even underwrote the artist's initial trip to Europe from 1851 to 1852. Haggerty had a penchant for artistic and cultured individuals and enjoyed the company of such well-known figures as the artist Asher B. Durand, the editor William Cullen Bryant, and the writer and art critic Henry T. Tuckerman. Haggerty, in turn, put Inness in touch with a number of his future patrons.

Samuel Gray Ward, an international banker whose principal residence was in Boston, discovered Lenox in 1844 while visiting Charles Sedgwick and his wife, who were year-round residents of the Berkshires. Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Charles's sister, was an accomplished writer who befriended Inness and asked him to illustrate the title page of her book Clarence (1849). This was a tight-knit circle of friends who became influential supporters of the artist--one of the reasons, no doubt, that Inness kept returning to the Berkshires.

Between 1853 and 1857 the prominent clergyman and writer Henry Ward Beecher spent summers in Lenox where he became one of Inness's long-standing patrons, owning seven of his paintings at the time of his death. Both men shared a belief in the spirituality of nature, something Inness sought to convey in his art. The beauty of the landscape in this part of New England provided the artist with the inspiration that was central to his mission as a landscape painter; the men who lived there and supported him gave him the means to pursue his lofty goals and by so doing to create some of the most poetic and inspired paintings of the period.

The catalogue of this exhibition contains two essays, one by Maureen Johnson Hickey and Sarah Lees and the other by Cornelia Brooke Gilder. It may be obtained from the Clark Art Institute Museum Shop by telephoning 413-458-2303 or through its Web site (http://stores.yahoo.com/clarkart).