GallerySlideshowBio
Near Montclaire
ca. 1894
25 1/4 X 38 5/8 inches
Oil on canvas
Sold
Born in Newburgh, New York, in 1825, George Inness was raised in New York City and Newark, New Jersey. His early life was disrupted by severe illness, and he had as a result little formal academic or artistic education. In Newark, he studied with the itinerant painter John Jesse Barker, and in New York, probably in 1843, with the French-born landscape painter, Regis Francois Gignoux. Inness visited Italy in 1850. In 1853 he visited France, where he studied French Barbizon landscape painting, admiring especially the work of the most radical of the Barbizon artists, Theodore Rousseau. This was, in the influence on his style, the most decisive experience of Inness’ artistic life. In the early 1860s Inness moved from New York to Medfield, Massachusetts. In 1864, he moved to Eagleswood, New Jersey. At Eagleswood he was introduced to the teaching of Emanuel Swedenborg. It became his religious faith, and determined, too, the increasingly allusive, expressive, and almost mystical character of his later art.
