Summer Silence (End of an Autumn Day)

Toward the end of his life, Inness began blending his Barbizon inclinations with a native spiritualism, for a highly personal result. Unlike other American painters who strove for the accurate rendering of topography, Inness was primarily concerned with setting a mood and conveying to the viewer a profound experience of nature. Here, the choice of a twilit hour and the lack of finish contribute to a sense, characteristic of Inness’s late pictures, that both light and life are rapidly fading. This melancholy contrasts with the optimism commonly associated with young American landscape painters, for whom the continent seemed to stretch toward a horizon of limitless possibility.