George Inness--the Complete Works

The works of George Inness are found online at http://www.georgeinness.org/ . Scans of 199 of his paintings can be found there. Inness made his home for many years in Montclair, New Jersey, and many of his paintings can still be seen there at the Montclair Art Museum.

Pompton Junction

Inness's Lackawanna Valley

The Lackawanna Valley, ca. 1855
George Inness

We mentioned the painting by George Inness of The Lackawanna Valley in class last week. The painting has been much-discussed by art critics who study landscape art. A particularly thorough study is Nicolai Cikovsky's 1970 article, "George Inness and the Hudson River School: The Lackawanna Valley," which appeared in American Art Journal.

In the article Cikovsky repeats Inness's story of finding the original in a Mexican pawn shop in 1891 (p. 48), and much of the latter third of the article is devoted to interpreting the painting itself. This is a nice example of how a single painting could provide the occasion for a solid term paper in this course.

Anyway, the Cikovsky article is well-worth reading if you have the time or interest. The full citation is:

Cikovsky, Nicolai Jr. "George Inness and the Hudson River School: "The Lackawanna Valley"." American Art Journal 2, no. 2, Autumn (1970): 36-57.

Westward the Star of Empire

Westward the Star of Empire Takes Its Way, 1867

Melrose's painting is among the most interesting we've seen so far. Here is an excerpt discussing the painting from a web exhibit titled "Nature and the American Identity" at the University of Virginia:

Melrose is deliberately evoking Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze's painting Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, which hangs in the U.S. Capitol. While Leutze depicts a mythological scene of Conestoga Wagons, pioneers on horseback, Daniel Boone figures, and truimphant families descending from what must be the Sierra Nevada mountains to find a pastoral landscape of plenty by the Pacific Ocean, Melrose paints a more realistic and ironic scene. Although this scene also shows a tension between wilderness and civilization through the newly constructed log cabin on the left and the standing trees and deer on the right, the jarring presence of the railroad questions the distinction between the two. The cabin is surrounded by the stumps of cleared trees, and the deer run from the intrusion of the train, but have no refuge from it in the human side of the painting. This painting questions the positivism of progress and appeals to a sense of nostalgia for the aboriginal state of American wilderness, which the Romantics would absorb and explore in their art and literature.

Lots of commentary on this painting out there.

Gilpin and the picturesque

Hey gang,
when in doubt, Wikipedia to the rescue for the basics. Here's an excerpt from the entry on William Gilpin:

In 1768 Gilpin published his popular Essay on Prints where he defined the picturesque as '"that kind of beauty which is agreeable in a picture" and began to expound his "principles of picturesque beauty", based largely on his knowledge of landscape painting. During the late 1760s and 1770s Gilpin travelled extensively in the summer holidays and applied these principles to the landscapes he saw, committing his thoughts and spontaneous sketches to notebooks. . . .

For Gilpin, both texture and composition were important in a "correctly picturesque" scene. The texture should be "rough", "intricate", "varied", or "broken", without obvious straight lines. The composition should work as a unified whole, incorporating several elements: a dark "foreground" with a "front screen" or "side screens", a brighter middle "distance", and at least one further, less distinctly depicted, "distance". A ruined abbey or castle would add "consequence". A low viewpoint, which tended to emphasise the "sublime", was always preferable to a prospect from on high. While Gilpin allowed that nature was good at producing textures and colours, it was rarely capable of creating the perfect composition. Some extra help from the artist, perhaps in the form of a carefully placed tree, was usually required. . . .

Although he came in for criticism, Gilpin had published at the exactly the right time. Improved road communications and travel restrictions on continental Europe saw an explosion of British domestic tourism in the 1780s and 1790s. Many of these picturesque tourists were intent on sketching, or at least discussing what they saw in terms of landscape painting. Gilpin's works were the ideal companions for this new generation of travellers; they were written specifically for that market and never intended as comprehensive travel guides.

The influence of Gilpin and Burke on subsequent philosophizing about landscape probably can't be emphasized enough. Another great topic!

More on Dutch landscape art

There is a large number of resources available online to study the art we will be looking at over the next few weeks. For example, The National Gallery of Art has a nice selection of Dutch landscape and seascape paintings available for viewing online, with accompanying narrative commentary.

Here is an excerpt that places Dutch art in context:

The emergence of the Dutch school of painting in the early seventeenth century is one of the most remarkable phenomena in the history of the visual arts. The Dutch Republic, a small country that had only become a political entity in 1579 and was still suffering from the effects of a long and arduous war with Spain, would hardly seem to have had the resources to nourish and sustain its artistic traditions. Nonetheless, in every respect, the Dutch seem to have drawn strength from adversity; they profited in terms of trade, political awareness, religious tolerance, wealth, and above all, self-esteem. They were proud of their achievements and were determined to provide for themselves a broad and lasting foundation that would define their unique social and cultural heritage.

The political and religious attitudes of the period are not readily apparent in the work of Dutch artists. The still lifes, portraits, landscapes, seascapes, and genre scenes that characterize this school of painting are surprisingly lacking in information on the major events of the day. Nevertheless, the philosophical bases from which artists worked are clearly the same as those governing decisions in contemporary political, military, and religious activities. This ideology was essentially threefold: that God's work is evident in the world itself; that, although things in this world are mortal and transitory, no facet of God's creation is too insubstantial to be noticed, valued, or represented; and that the Dutch, like the ancient Israelites, were a chosen people, favored and blessed by God's protection.

Underlying the essential realism of Dutch art, thus, is an allegorical view of nature that provided a means for conveying various messages to contemporary viewers. The Dutch, with their ingrained Calvinist beliefs, were a moralizing people. While they thoroughly enjoyed the sensual pleasures of life, they were aware of the consequences of wrong behavior. Paintings, even those representing everyday objects and events, often provide reminders about the brevity of life and the need for moderation and temperance in one's conduct. Subjects drawn from the Bible, mythology, and ancient history, likewise, were often chosen for their moralizing messages or for establishing parallels between the Dutch experience and great historical, literary, and political events of the past.

For further resources, check out some of the links on the "old" course web page.

Forest Scene, c. 1655
Jacob van Ruisdael