American landscape painter. He was without formal training but developed his style in the course of frequent visits to Europe, being particularly influenced by the Barbizon School. His work falls into two fairly distinct periods. In the first he attempted to bring greater breadth to American Romantic realism, dissolving hard outline into a play of atmosphere and colour, but with something of the ordered beauty of Claude (Peace and Plenty , Met. Mus., New York, 1865). From c. 1859, when he went to live in the village of Medfield outside Boston, his style began to change to a more intimate manner of landscape in which he chose deliberately unpicturesque subjects and relied for pictorial appeal on subtle harmonies of colour and broad massing of light and shade. Inness has often been considered the outstanding American Landscape painter of the 19th cent.
His son, George Inness, jun. (1854-1926), was also a painter and published an account of his father's career--Life, Art, and Letters of George Inness --in 1917.
[Chilvers, Ian, Harold Osborne, and Dennis Farr, eds. Oxford Dictionary Of Art. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.]
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