John O'Brien Inman

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1998 by Carolyn B. Wilkinson

John O'Brien Inman (Pl. II), an accomplished artist in his day, is now known only to a handful of art historians and collectors. We have no journals or sketchbooks of his work, only his paintings, which are mostly pleasant and occasionally profound. His work ranges through all the specialties appropriate to his time.

John Inman was the son of Henry Inman (1801-1846), a well-known portrait and genre painter who made a decided impact on American art and who, in 1826, was one of the founders and the first vice president of the National Academy of Design in New York City.(1) The younger Inman received his training from his father, who died of asthma and an enlarged heart in 1846, leaving the family destitute. A memorial exhibition of Henry Inman's work held at the American Art-Union netted nearly two thousand dollars, which was given to Henry Inman's widow, Jane Riker O'Brien Inman.

John Inman's earliest known work is a watercolor of a conch shell signed and dated January 22, 1846, five days after his father's death [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. It is also inscribed "First attempt in water colours." In the summer of 1846 he made four watercolors of the Ekford-Inman house in New York City (see Pl. III), the home of his uncle, also John Inman.(2)

The New York Times of January 24, 1852, announced the artist's marriage to C. Adeline Hedley, about whom little is known.(3) There is no record of the couple's separation or divorce, but one Inman family descendant recalled, "I read somewhere that John O'Brien Inman was divorced and his children took the name of their stepfather 'Trenner' or something I cannot tell you more."(4) There is no additional evidence that Inman ever remarried, but his death certificate declares that he was widowed.(5)

Inman began his career painting portraits and miniatures in his studio at 44 Broadway, New York City, perhaps attempting to rival the career of his famous father. While no miniatures have yet come to light, some small portraits have. His earliest known portrait was of a little girl, painted in 1848.(6) Portrait of Lady, owned by a Mrs. P. Sandford, was shown at the National Academy of Design in 1853.(7) He spent the spring and summer of the following year in Savannah and Athens, Georgia, and while in Athens probably painted the portrait of Alonzo Church, the president of the University of Georgia, shown in Plate IX. The portrait is neither signed nor dated, but Athens was a small town at the time and had no resident portraitist. Inman's only competition was an itinerant photographer who advertised in the same issue of the Athens Southern Banner as Inman did - the issue of May 25, 1854. A news item in the Banner of June 1, 1854, advised potential customers interested in Inman's work to contact Thomas R. R. Cobb (1823-1862), a prominent Athens lawyer.(8)

If Cobb commissioned a painting from Inman it is unlocated.(9) Cobb organized Cobb's Legion in 1861 for the service of the Confederacy and is said to have had "a distinctly Southern point of view."(10) He was killed at the battle of Fredericksburg in 1862. In 1863, the year Abraham Lincoln promulgated the Emancipation Proclamation, Inman painted his sensitive if pessimistic Uncle Dick (Pl. IV). It seems to symbolize all blacks at a time when their fate was perceived as the subject of a vicious war. It is one of three paintings of blacks Inman is known to have painted.(11)

Like many artists in this period, Inman traveled the countryside to paint. About 1860 he went to the Adirondack Mountains in New York State, where he painted Whitehouse Falls, exhibited at the Brooklyn Art Association in Brooklyn, New York, in 1861.(12) In 1864 and 1865 he painted four more Adirondack scenes: Adirondack Iron Works, Adirondack Mountain Lake, Lake George, and Lake George Landscape.(13)

In February 1865 a New York City newspaper carried the following notice:

Inman has nearly finished a landscape of the headwaters of the Hudson River in the Adirondacks, from a study made in that region the past season. He has also just commenced his figure piece representing a scene in "Three Guardsmen" [Alexandre Dumas's Three Musketeers?] which will doubtless be one of his more successful works?

Inman's wanderings in the Adirondacks took place well before the rush to the mountains by artists and others who were known as Murray's fools - for William H. H. Murray, whose Adventures in the Wilderness; or Camp-Life in the Adirondacks of 1869 popularized the Adirondack region.(15)

The volume of his known work and his exhibition record indicate that the early 1860s was the most prosperous time for Inman, and it was prosperous for the American art market as a whole. Inman was elected an associate member of the National Academy of Design in 1865, and was represented in the annual exhibition that year with a painting entitled Christmas Offering, which one critic described as a "strongly depicted" floral cross.(16) Indeed, Inman was a proficient flower painter. Images of roses, lilacs, peonies, and other vegetation abound in his art throughout his career and proved very marketable (see Pls. V, VI).