Art: Capturer of Whims

At Manhattan’s National Academy of Design that day in 1894, the U.S. flag flew at half-mast. The artist who had just died was called a “giant,” and the academy spared itself nothing to give him a giant’s funeral. The casket of silver and velvet was lost among palm leaves and flowers, a bust of the dead man stood on a pedestal, and the grand stairway was draped in black. All this was fitting for an age that loved a good show, but it could not have been more inappropriate for the most unobtrusive of painters, George Inness.

Inness was a frail epileptic who had only one month’s formal training in his life; yet he was, along with Homer, Eakins, and Ryder, one of the few great painters in the U.S. in his day. He was a master of catching the subtle whims of nature, and he could bathe the most or dinary scene in poetry. While more fashionable colleagues strained for panoramas —the vast valleys and rugged mountain chains of a newly self-conscious America —Inness was quite satisfied to paint whatever lay just beyond his own backyard. Last week the Paine Art Center, in Oshkosh, Wis., displayed 27 Inness paintings, a pleasant reminder of how much magic can be wrung from the gathering of a storm, the first nips of autumn, or simply the coming on of evening.

For so gentle a painter, George Inness was occasionally a trial. When his father, a Newark merchant, got him a job in a store, young George hid from the customers until the customers ceased to come. He worked with a map-making outfit for a while, quit in a huff, then returned and quitagain. Finally, he settled down to painting, with just enough sales and help from patrons to support himself and his growing family.

In his early years, he admired the stagy effects of the Hudson River school, but neither at home nor during his travels abroad did he ever fall for long under the influence of any one group or man. In everything he did, as a matter of fact, he was a bit out of the mainstream. He was a Swedenborgian, a single taxer, a man who would go to just about any lengths to avoid putting on a new suit. He would work without stopping for 15 hours at a stretch, would often compulsively paint a picture on top of another before the first was even dry. Clients who thought that they had bought a harvest scene would find that it had turned into a woodland before it was delivered.

Only occasionally, as in Off the Coast of Cornwall, did Inness’ paintings turn stormy. Usually they were tranquil scenes in which rivers rippled rather than roared, and the winds that ruffled the trees were rarely rougher than breezes. As the years passed, Inness softened his outlines until all the shapes and forms of nature seemed about to melt together. At their best, his paintings have a rare dreamlike unity: every tree and bush is in its place, but never so greedy for attention as to jolt the overall harmony.