Inness

he was placed under the instruction of one
Barker, who shortly declared that he had taught
him all he knew.

At the age of sixteen George entered the em-
ploy of Sherman & Smith, map engravers, in
New York, where he remained about a year.
Then he became the pupil of Regis Gignoux, a
French landscapist who had set up a studio in
New York. This was the only technical training
in painting that he ever had. About 1845 he took
a studio for himself and began his professional
career. He boarded at the Astor House and paid
for his board in pictures. He had already done
some sketching from nature at Pottsville, Pa.,
where his elder brother James lived. A signifi-
cant remark made by George Inness as to his
struggle to render the "action of the clouds" de-
notes the seriousness with which as a youth he
grappled with the difficulties of his vocation.
Beyond doubt, however, his early productions
were crude. His first exhibition picture, "Af-
ternoon," painted in 1846, and shown at the Art
Union, was tight and niggling, with a little of
everything in the composition—woods and hills,
fields and pastures, trees and stream, cattle and
sheep, horse and rider, red barn and bridge—yet
it had an air of rustic actuality.

One of the young painter's first patrons was
Ogden Haggerty, an auctioneer, who bought
several of his pictures and supplied him with
money for his first trip abroad in 1847. Inness
went to Italy, and spent a year there, painting in
the vicinity of Rome. Soon after his return he
married Delia Miller of Newark. She died about
six months later. In 1850 he married Elizabeth
Hart of New York. She was then seventeen,
and he was twenty-five. In 1851 they went to
Italy in a sailing vessel, and remained there two
years. Their first child was born in Florence.
They returned in 1852, lived for a while in
Brooklyn, then made another visit to Europe in
I8$4, going this time to France, and lodging in
the Latin Quarter of Paris, where their son
George was born. The work of Rousseau, Corot,
and Daubigny made a deep and lasting impres-
sion upon Inness at this time. Returning from
France, the family again found themselves at
home in Brooklyn, and there they stayed until
1859, when they moved to Boston, thence shortly
going to Medfield, Mass., a quiet suburban town,
where they lived for five years. Three more
children were born. In Medfield Inness painted
some of his most famous and beautiful canvases
i# an old barn which he had converted into a
studio. Among the most frequent visitors at this
period were Mark Fisher, George N. Cass, and

Inness
J. A. S. Monks, ardent admirers and disciples of
Inness.
After the close of the Civil War Inness was
induced to go to Eagleswood, N. J., by Marcus
Spring, a friend who constituted himself the art-
isf s business agent and sales manager. In 1871
Inness made another journey abroad, and this
time he stayed four years, most of the time in or
near Rome. After his return he spent one year
in Boston, then he went to New York and took a
studio in West Fifty-fifth Street. Finally, in
1878, he removed to an old house in Montclair,
N. J., where the rest of his life was passed
happily, with occasional intervals of travel to
Florida, California, Virginia, Nantucket, and
elsewhere. He died of heart disease at Bridge
of Allan, Scotland, while traveling, Aug. 3,1894.
His body was brought back to the United States,
and an impressive funeral was held on Aug. 23
at the National Academy of Design, New York.
He was survived by his wife, his son George,
and his daughter Helen, the wife of Jonathan
Scott Hartley [q*v.~\. The winter following his
death, a sale of his paintings took place in New
York, and some 240 works, many of them
sketches, brought a total of $108,670. Up to
1875, at which time he was fifty years old, the
sale of his works had brought him no adequate
income. He had been blissfully indifferent to
money, economic cares having been shouldered
for him at various periods by Ogden Haggerty,
Marcus Spring, his own brothers, and sundry
picture dealers in Boston and New York. But
in the seventies a still more valiant guardian
angel came upon the scene in the person of
Thomas B. Clarke, who bought thirty-five land-
scapes and set a fashion that was soon followed
by other rich collectors—Seney, Halsted, Ells-
worth, and many more. Then Inness' income be-
came larger than that of any landscape painter
living. His conviction that merchants existed
chiefly for the purpose of supporting artists was
thus pleasantly confirmed. So long as he could
be left free to work twelve or more hours a day
at his easel, nothing else mattered.
His early work had some of the earmarks of
the Hudson River school; that is to say, it was
scenic and literal, with minute detail elaborated
at the expense of unity and breadth. But as soon
as he became acquainted with the work of the
men of 1830 in France, as soon as his own study
of nature taught him the pictorial value of sug-
gestion as opposed to objective realism, his style
underwent a steady development in the direction
of lyricism and individuality. He gave expres-
sion to his strong feeling for the poetic side of
landscape, for the subtle beauties of tone and of