Landscape

The Barbizon school of landscape painting (active from approximately 1825–1875) made a lasting impression on George Inness when he saw those artists’ works exhibited in France in the early 1850s. Inness was drawn to the school’s realist mixture of expressive brushwork and deep response to nature. Without appropriating the Barbizon style wholesale, Inness used it as a productive vehicle for his own spiritual approach to landscape. While one might see traces of Impressionism in Inness’s sketchy technique, he disliked that group’s emphasis on the surface appearances of things. As a critic wrote around the time of this painting, “In the mind of Inness, religion, landscape, and human nature mingle so thoroughly that there is no separating the several ideas.”