George Inness and the unfinished painting

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2003 by Adrienne Baxter Bell

The communicative power of the unfinished work of art was a primary source of inspiration for the American landscape painter George Inness (Fig.1). He recognized the heightened capacity of an unfinished painting or sculpture to conjure ideas and emotions, and for artistic, historical, psychological, jurisdictional, personal, and theological reasons he mined the unfinished work of art for a pictorial grammar on which to build a new language of landscape painting. His late landscapes show how he came to identify as one of his highest goals the challenge of creating works imbued with the thought-provoking potential of the unfinished painting.

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Born in Newburgh, New York, Inness received little formal artistic training. As was the case for the majority of his Hudson River school colleagues, he learned his trade by studying mechanical reproductions of old master paintings, notably landscapes by Claude Lorrain (1600-1682). Inness's earliest works, such as the accomplished A Bit of the Roman Aqueduct (Pl.II), bear witness to his facility with the compositional formulas of European landscape painting. He includes shepherds and cattle in the foreground, a small body of water framed by trees near the middle ground, and, in the distance, a mountain range that leads the eye into space. In the exactitude of its representation A Bit of the Roman Aqueduct embodies the much publicized advice to artists of Asher Brown Durand (1796-1886): "draw with scrupulous fidelity the outline or contour of such objects as you shall select. ... Every kind of tree has its traits of individuality ... with careful attention, these peculiarities are easily learned. (1)

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Such meticulousness did not remain long in Inness's artistic vocabulary. Already possessing the instinct to paint more expressively than his American colleagues, Inness found that landscapes of the Barbizon school, which he first saw during trips to Paris in 1852 and 1853-1854, spurred his nascent desire to paint more freely and to feature more intimate subjects. In an interview in 1878, he recalled how impressed he had been during those early years with the works of Jean Baptiste Camille Corot (see Pl.IV), Charles Francois Daubigny (1817-1878), and Pierre Etienne Theodore Rousseau (1812-1867), singling them out as "among the very best" landscape painters. (2) Barbizon pictorial practices enliven Inness's The Huntsman (Pl. III), in which flecked, calligraphic brushstrokes capture the aura of mystery that veils the densely wooded clearing. The setting echoes Rousseau's in The Forest in Winter at Sunset (1845-1867; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City), and Inness's brushstrokes resemble those Corot used in his late masterpiece Ville-d'Avray (Pl. IV). True to the aesthetic principles of the Barbizon school, Inness ignored the representation integrity of his subjects allowed the bodies of the huntsman and his prey to trail off into the forest. He pursued the elusive suggestiveness that characterizes vibrant, capricious dialectics between light and shade deep within nature.

The approach to painting that Inness demonstrated so beautifully in The Huntsman and other works of the late 1850s and early 1860s became a central component of the much admired landscape he painted during the final fifteen years of his life. At the heart of this approach to painting was Inness's understanding of the aim of art, which was "not to instruct, not to edify, but to awaken an emotion. (3) The idea that a work of art could appeal to our deepest emotions resonated throughout Barbizon painting and greatly appealed to Inness.

In the 1860s Inness painted more suggestively, with more attention to conjuring emotional responses in his viewers than providing them with detailed information. His masterful Evening Landscape (Pl. V) remains one of the finest, most evocative paintings of this period. While not unfinished, it conveys many of the qualities that Inness explored in his later, unfinished works. Here, warm, lambent sunlight bathes a country road framed by towering trees. Two farmers return from a day of labor; one with a load of firewood on his back and the other with oxen pulling a cart. Neither the setting nor the activities comprise the chief interest, which is the expressive capacity of Inness's myriad brushstrokes: the lightly flecked strokes that produce leaves; the bolder, swirled strokes that create the illusion of bushes at the right; the sharp daubs of yellow ocher that roughly demarcate a path through the grass; and the equally powerful daubs of lemony green that allude to the grass itself.

Inness continued to develop the brushstroke as a liaison between artist and viewer or, more precisely, between the artist and the viewer's imagination. In Old Aqueduct, Campagna, Rome (Pl. VII), painted during his stay in Italy between 1870 and 1874, Inness reveals a new, economical brushstroke in his representation of the herd of sheep in the foreground. With flicks of his wrist he allows each sheep to materialize in no more than five daubs of paint--white mixed with touches of red, lemon chrome, and black. Sheep in the distance required one supremely confident stroke apiece. Old Aqueduct is decidedly not an oil sketch, nor is it an unfinished painting. Instead, it is a finished composition in which Inness reveals a masterful ability to register tangible forms through the most summary means. Rather than sheep, Inness's virtuosic brushstrokes present the essence of sheep.