George Inness

George Inness (May 1, 1825 – August 3, 1894) was a prominent American landscape painter.

One of the most influential American artists of the nineteenth century, Inness was influenced, in turn, by the Old Masters, the Hudson River school, the Barbizon school, and, finally, the theology of Emanuel Swedenborg, whose spiritualism found vivid expression in the take steps of Inness's maturity (1879–1894).

Although Inness's style evolved through determined stages greater than a prolific career that spanned over forty years and 1,000 paintings, his works consistently earned roar for their powerful, coordinated efforts to elicit extremity of mood, atmosphere, and emotion. Neither fixed idea realist nor impressionist, Inness was a transitional figure who designed for his works to augment both the earthly and the ethereal in order to capture the unlimited essence of a locale. A master of light, color, and shadow, he became noted for creating intensely ordered and highbrow scenes that often juxtaposed hazy or blurred elements with rasping and refined details to evoke an interweaving of both the inborn and the spiritual plants of experience. In Inness's words, he attempted through his art to whisk the "reality of the unseen” and to attach the "visible upon the invisible."

Within his own lifetime, art critics hailed Inness as one of America's greatest artists. Often called "the daddy of American landscape painting," Inness is best known for his mature works that not without help exemplified the Tonalist pastime but after that displayed an indigenous and uniquely American style.