Life, art, and letters of George Inness : illustrated with portraits and many reproductions of paintings

Front matter

I

LIFE, ART, AND LETTERS OF GEORGE INNESS

GEORGE INNESS (Painted by George Inness, Jr.)

Preface

What I would like to give you is George Inness; as he was, as he talked, as he lived — not what I saw in him or how I interpreted him, but him — and having given you all I can remember of what he said and did I want you to form your own opinion.

My story shall be a simple rendering of facts — as I remember them; in other words, I will put the pigment on the canvas and leave it to you to form the picture.

George Inness, Jr.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to acknowledge the courtesy of the following persons and institutions who have been of great assistance in furnishing me with the material for this book: Mrs. J. Scott Hartley, Mr. James W. Ellsworth, Mr. Thomas B. Clarke, Mr. Victor Harris, Mr. Martin A. Ryerson and Mr. Ralph Cudney ; The Metropolitan Museum of Art and M. Knoedler & Co., New York City, The Art Institute of Chicago.

I wish also to make acknowledgment of the services of my friend, Leize R. Godwin, whose wise counsel has made the task of writing this book a pleasure.

Biography is always interesting when true, and valuable in the same degree. It takes on a new character when written by oneself in the form of memoirs, yet is seldom fully successful, because of the human temptation to suppress real and interesting facts, or, when sufficient effrontery or courage — if it be courage — exists to tell everything, the reader is likely to be offended, even if interested.

In this way the memoirs of Cellini might have been more valuable, though less interesting, if another had set down the truths of this man's inner life and character. It is almost, if not quite, impossible for one to analyze one's own soul and write out for public gaze the secrets hidden there. It shocks the sensitive spirit and creates a wound not to be borne ; therefore, as it seems to me. all biography treads the broad highway of external facts and passing events, leaving the deep, still pools, which reflect all the spiritual and emotional being, untroubled. In this condition of things we must be content with what we can get, being assured that whatever we can preserve of the life and

xi impulses of a great man will be of value to the world.

It does not follow that intimacy gives one the privilege of interpretation, but at least it assures us a measure of truth, which increases its richness in the proportion of sympathy brought to the task, because sympathy begets insight. Without sympathy virtually all observation is blind, and no one quality in man's nature is so potent in removing the scales from true vision.

We do not know what we should have had if George Inness had written his own biography. Eccentric it certainly would have been, with slight attention paid to those externals which are of interest to the general reader; for he was the most impersonal of men. He was never interested in himself as a man, though he was interested in the artistic man. He believed in himself as an artist very profoundly, and his mind, which was most alert, was ever delving into or solving problems connected with what he called the principles of painting. Of this sort of thing we should have had a great deal, more indeed than any of us could have understood, because he was not always coherent. To himself his reasoning was very clear; indeed, he valued the results of these mental debates greatly, many times writing them down. What has become of these writings I do not know, but no doubt they were written in such a vagrant, dis-

xii jointed way that they could not be pieced together by another.

In speech his vocabulary was rapid, extensive, extreme, not always well chosen as to meaning; but, when supplied with gesture and expression, words took on new meanings, and for the time were understandable. If reported verbatim, they would have failed of meaning. Just how they would have appeared in any biography I do not know, for cold type is ever a cruel critic.

He once expounded to me what he called the ascent of a fleck of soot to the pure diamond by the vortexical progress, and proved, to himself at least, divinity. Frankly, I could not follow either the thought or the reasoning, though it seemed intensely interesting, and I begged him to write it down. He said that he had spent the night doing so, but I have never heard of the writing^ and inquiry did not reveal it. During the delivery of this exegesis his declamation was flaming, very fierce, and assured. His eyes sparkled, and his mane-like hair was tossed about, and hands were as vigorously in motion as possible, the whole manner commanding attention; but once completed, once fully told, the fever passed, and he was silent and very quiet. After such struggles he returned to his painting with new spirit and new insight, and always one could see the growth in power in the work. Who

xiii shall say what he saw within himself, what new realms or wide horizons were opened to his vision?

He was a man of great energy, and with no great amount of strength otherwise, and always he drove himself to the utmost. His best work was ever accomplished at white heat and under great emotion. Watching him closely, I many times saw him at work with cold calculation, but without exception these pictures endured only for a time, and were repainted when the fever was upon him. It was this consuming energy which burned up his vitality and brought his end. There was no other reason, no disease or insistent illness sapping away his life, but rather a burning up. Many canvases which have come down to us in their beauty and glowing glory cost him days of exquisite agony, so that we may truly say of them that they were painted with heart's blood.

In his mind there was no particle of that quality which we have come to know as modern art. His own was cast in those channels the canons of which have been written in all ages by those great men whose genius has made their work endure. He knew that fashion in art is a theory and a vain bubble, of no account to those who blow it or those who think its colors of worth. During his working days there were as many isms abroad as there are to-day, but he would have none of them, realizing keenly, as most

xiv thoughtful men do, that their lure is rather to the man who has no power of thought, of invention within himself; that it is not, and, in its own nature, cannot be born of sincerity. Here alone is the rock upon which the true artist ever takes his stand.

Our study of the great work of George Inness easily discovers its sincerity. It matters not if we are looking at the careful studies of early days or the more synthetic canvases of the last years, we read in them all knowledge. How like the name of a god the word comes in the midst of work based on crudity ! To Inness it was an essential thing, and always behind the consciousness of knowledge was nature.

In those works which express the man's message, there is never a servile copying of place or thing ; yet both are in place, both fully understood, and the beauty of the nature he wishes us to see is fully revealed— revealed, too, in George Inness's way. And that again is one of the beauties of great landscape art — any art, for that matter, which claims to be fine art — it is always plus the man.

There is little gain for art in the exquisite copying of things. Many have tried it, many have spent long hours and days in servile reproduction, and begotten in the end an emptiness, a thing which has the same relation to art that an inanimate has to an animate creature ; but in the study which produces understand-

xv

INTRODUCTION ing, in the loving observation which teaches, in the absorption of idea— in such ways men acquire the knowledge which gives them expression, which permits them, within the silence of four blank walls, to see visions and to give gifts to men. It is through such works that we know and love the great men, and through such works that they uplift humanity and better civilization. They left for us a curtain, and eyes which have been dull before are illumined. A great work, indeed!

It is because of this great inner vision that George Inness must take rank among the greatest landscape-painters, almost, we might say, himself the greatest of all, but for that American objection to the claims of any man in any walk of life to being acclaimed greatest.

Yet a measure of his work is being taken by the passing years, and we begin to see what a genius has dwelt among us. No matter the carping voice of critic, no matter the contempt of little painters of painted things, this was his towering gift to us— this power to present the essence of things. Consider, the greatest of his pictures were painted out of what people fondly call his imagination, his memorypainted within the four walls of a room, away from and without reference to any particular nature; for he himself was nature. And it is not alone the beauty

xvi of a great elm against a sunlit sky, it is not merely the chase of storm-driven clouds, it is not only the crash and thunder of mighty seas against the rock-ribbed shores of a continent, not morning, noon, or night; not one, but all were his, and all are George Inness.

His versatility was enormous; the glow of it wrapped about him like a flame. His eyes burned like fire when in coal and red-hot; he looked through the blank canvas, through the besmeared paint, through the days and hours of work, to that vision which was within himself, and that alone was his goal, and no likeness of any place or thing tempted him aside. The impetuosity of it as he approached the goal was like a storm, and to any but an understanding eye the process was as devastating as a storm; but high above the trammels of technic, of form, of color, or pigment, his soul, eagle-like, soared to its aery, and the vision, wide of horizon, perfect in all its parts, was complete. Men do not paint so who have not the immortal spark. Tiresome drones who do their little, and delude themselves — how easily are they scorched in such a fire! Fire it was, but not always alight. No man had deeper moods of despondency, no man suffered more deeply under bafHed aims, no man more ruthlessly destroyed in order to make new, than this painter; but like a grim warrior, against

xvii whose striving the battle has gone badly, he would say, "I '11 do it to-morrow." The splendor of this courage never left him. To the last he knew and believed in his own gift, and seldom did it fail him. Time alone was needed, and the beautiful thing was sure of birth.

There is no doubt that he died when his powers were at their full; he would not have been content to linger if they had waned, and he would have been keenly aware of it.

Elsewhere I have tried to show that there was change: the early, exact, careful analysis; the middle, broader, fuller, more colored period; and the latest, synthetic style, which includes so many of his beautiful works. But always the power was there.

It is perhaps interesting to note the difference in the artist who works in the way that I have here tried to indicate and in that more exact copyist, who, strong only in his eyes, and depending always upon them, grows blind and weak at the last. His is never the glory of departing in flame, like some grand old viking, who seeks his rest in the burning hour of inspiration.

A painter critic has spoken of Mr. Inness's technic as being "empirical." By technic he refers to the method of using his pigment to produce result. Such

xviii an opinion is largely the voice of the schoolman, of one who in the schools was taught the precise method of mixing tints and conveying them to the canvas, each tint to represent a certain plane or value in the form. One does not want to quarrel with the schools, for their place and usefulness is clear, but it is quite possible to say that the student who stops with what he gains in a school does not go far. If he does not pursue, investigate, and experiment, he will never discover, and discovery is essential to any personal technical expression; and such development, when successful, is apt to reveal not only the painter, but the artist. Also, one must be able to control this result of experiment until it becomes a servant, willing, plastic, ready at all times to the guiding will. This was colossally sb with George Inness, and his technical power was so superior to what the intellectual schoolmen accomplish that his work burns with the fire of genius and inspiration. He himself believed that his method was intensely scientific. Certainly the proof lies in his work. If there were times when it seemed to fail him, times when change and repainting were necessary, it may not rest a charge against the clarity of his method. Much goes into the use of pigment other than brush-work. An over-strained nervous system, a stomach out of order, a voice which persists will untune the finer forces and render a day's work

xix wholly abortive; the humming of a fly or bee has robbed many a sensitive artist of his day's result.

Inness knew truths of color that I have never known any one else even to glimpse. He knew great principles of color application which lesser men could not grasp. He had no interest in details of color or in small, attentuated tints. His was the power of mass, the authority of tone upon tone, the concentration of a tone in its base color, which lured you into consciousness of its presence. In another it would have been inconceivably dull and stagnant. For these reasons and more I believe he not only had a masterly technic, but I believe it more nearly equaled the strength and understanding of the great masters than any of our men have attained. He is certainly not like any one of the great galaxy; you may find kinship of energy and dynamic force in Tintoretto more than another. He was fond of thinking it was Titian he most resembled, and the spiritist mediums, finding this out, were forever telling him that Titian stood at his elbow. The impetuosity of Tintoretto was fully reflected in Inness: his swiftness in composition, his ease of expression with the brush in great masses without previous outlines reflects, also, some of the great Italian's characteristics, and each had the capacity for holding the wild, splendid force in leash until great tenderness was achieved. To say, then,

XX that his technic was anything but suitable is to misstate, and to misunderstand the man.

Among the younger painters of the day it is a habit to speak slightingly of Mr. Inness and his method of work. They say his technic was fumbling, uncertain, glazy, and lacking in directness; that he could not paint frankly or directly; that his effects were rather matters of chance than anything else. Oh, the wisdom of youth — youth whose smallest utterance is axiomatic! Have they ever seriously looked upon the "Gray, Lowery Day," a canvas painted rapidly, with no hint of glaze or fumble, a canvas in which the goal is reached with the precision of the great master? And such a goal! Here is no simple sketch of uninteresting objects, but a mood of nature so subtle that thought of it even is intangible and enveloped within intricacies of form so elaborate that the rendering of them under most passive conditions would tax the powers of any technician; and yet this envelop of moist, rainy atmosphere is rendered with a direct touch, a transfer of pigment to canvas as direct and exact as a Franz Hals or a John Sargent, both the gods of direct painting; and in the finished result Mr. Inness has produced a work of unity and pure beauty, enough in itself to proclaim him a world master.

Or, again, may I direct the attention of these im-

xxi mature artists to that other well-known work and very noble example of direct painting, the "Summer Foliage," a picture in which the difficulties were enormous and the details most elaborate, involving, also, a control over greens, which is a most trying color to manage, and the brush of George Inness moves with a sanity and joy that is fair necromancy? No juggler could have handled his material with more alertness and conviction, and there has never for an instant been the loss of the central vision of beauty. This was the creed of George Inness — beauty. Translated into all its forms, loved as spirit, religion, God, this he searched daily, hourly, and worshiped.

Could he have had an early intellectual, even scientific, training, he would have reached tremendous heights intellectually, for his mind was that of an investigator. If to-day the things we read of his are incoherent, they are so rather in form than substance. A careful analysis will discover the true center, the germ truth which he wished to convey, and nearly always it is a vision, a creation of an intense, yearning spirit. Intense, eager, often abandoned in his speech, there was the glow of idea behind all his thought ; and however abstruse the theme, he carried it back with unerring persistence to his work. There, he knew, was his chief hope of expression.

Does it matter if untrained minds can not read

xxii these things in his works? Does it matter if a large element of the general public, or even the artistic public, shall say these things are purely imaginary, no picture can contain such things, it is merely what it appears to be, and that ends it? The answer is, George Inness did not trouble himself to paint for this public. First and foremost, he, the artist, not the man, was to be satisfied; he must be able to discern in the work that significance he sought to hand on, and when he found it in his picture, that moment the canvas was finished. Finished then for him was expression. Try him by no other laws. Complain not of roughness or smoothness, cavil not at incomplete or imperfectly rendered forms, at blemishes, or scratches, or unexplained spots. These may all be present, but behind all is the man, and his vision freely given and freely expressed. If we cannot see, the fault lies in ourselves.

Just as truly all these things may be said of any of the masters: of Corot less perhaps than of Rousseau; of Dupre more than of Millet; of Velasquez; of Hals; of everybody who has been remembered in the great mill-race flood of painters through the ages. Few, alas! can grapple with the mighty forces underlying a great work ; but none surely may be frivolous or contemptuous in its presence, unless, indeed, he be

xxiii a Post-impressionist or Futurist. But, then, I am speaking of human beings.

Can any sane man, however untrained, go into the presence of the great portrait of Innocent X by- Velasquez and remain unmoved? Can any man of even partial culture remain unmoved in the presence of the great "Moonlight" recently shown by George Inness? These are of the essence of greatness, and it is this essence which George Inness distilled in the long years of his labor, until in the end the roll of his great achievements was very long.

He often wished that he might be privileged to paint only one truly great work. Perhaps, in those halls where gather the great of all times and ages and peoples he has been welcomed with this assurance. That might well be heaven indeed to so striving a soul.

Mr. Inness was most happily fortunate in his marriage. To one of his impetuous, easily ruffled nature the lack of sympathy in his wife would have been. a constant irritation and impediment to his progress; but his wife was sensitive to his every mood, careful of his needs, keenly alive to his hopes in his work, and to the last hour of his life his comfort and his friend. That last cry at the Bridge-of- Allan, when he knew the final moment had come, was not to God or man.

xx iv

"Take me to my wife," he said. She was then his refuge and his strength, and we, who have had so much from him, must remember her, with fullest gratitude.

You will search far in his work to find an insincere canvas or an irreverent one. If there were times when he painted the uncongenial thing because it was ordered, it was done that he might be free to pursue those beacons which ever burned ahead of him.

No man ever had a more bitter tongue for the thing which was untrue in art — "a sham," as he called it. No man could scold with sterner rebuke, and none was more generous in praise when it was deserved. \

If we are to estimate him correctly or fully, we must see clearly and bring together all these qualities, and then only may we discover the true worth of his work.

It is not enough to say, "That 's a fine thing," of a work which contains so much. It is not enough to pass it with a slight comment, as we see so frequently done by our critics. A great work merits great attention and deep consideration, and it is necessary to bring to such consideration ripe understanding. Also preconceived bias warps judgment. Mr. Inness was not always a good critic; his own thoughts dominated him, forced him to see things in his own way; and to

XXV yield to him palette and brushes was to unfold speedily not a criticism, but an Inness. Perhaps this should be so, as a strong personality should not give up its own; but one would look elsewhere for criticism. For such reasons, no doubt, Mr. Inness had no pupils. He had from time to time certain men near him, but with him to teach meant to control.

I have always been glad that he was so violent. It is better to swallow one's spleen and learn than to chew the rag of discontent.

Nowhere in his work will be found any picture with likeness to the art of another; they are his own, warp and woof, and no shred of anybody else creeps in, and this despite his avowed admiration for many others. Time after time I 've heard him say of some finished thing, when his enthusiasm was ripe, "It 's like a Claude," or a "Turner," and then slyly, "but it's more like an Inness." For Claude and for Turner he had great admiration, but also ready criticism. He was hostile to anything that was "niggled." Breadth was essential, and for this quality many of his own works were obliterated, but his relentless courage brought the great work to completion in time.

Much has been written of him as artist and man, much that savors merely of the reporter's comments, and some things so vague and wordy that nothing of

xxvi an image remains. I, myself, have tried to set down in various places and ways my impressions gained in many years of close association, but I am aware of the futility of recreation. He has gone, and the wisest and best way to know George Inness is to sit before his works, to search them to their depths, to study each item of composition, its bearing upon the great mass, to find, if one may, the law by which he constructed his proportions and placements, to discover the reasons for color or tone choice, or that deeper significance, the impulse, artistic and religious, which created it. So we will come into closer touch with his great genius, so we will live with his spirit, and presently be able to understand why he should be accorded that high place in landscape art which is second to none, more dynamic than many, intenser than all, true as the best, and with a musical chord in his color that has never been approached.

In the work before us his son, an artist of rich attainments, has given us a picture of his father, the man and his habits, and with this has told to us, in incident and story, many of them new to me as they will be to the public, all reflecting most clearly the ingenuous nature of his father. With this he has combined letters and opinions of great value, the letters being tender, sweet chords from that melody of perfect love which existed between the master and his

xxvii wife, full of the faith and trust which made her presence his inspiration. In the writings, some of a purely scientific nature, it is necessary to acquaint oneself with his point of view, his trend of thought; once this is secured, the reasoning clarifies and becomes of greatest value.

At a moment in our art when the young people and many of the public are being hoodwinked and blinded by the follies which followed the first onslaught of Impressionism, like a procession of harlequins, gnomes, misshapen and weird things, the opinion of George Inness is worth study and reflection. His was not a sight to be blinded by an eccentricity, his was not an experience to be misled, nor could he believe the message of the masters was to be ignored ; therefore, brief as they are, and I would that the "mountains of writings" Mr. Inness often referred to had been given us entire, their value is extreme.

The picture is very clear; the man revisits us, and the wizardry of his work is our precious possession.

Time, inexorable and vast, passes along the way; he reaps here and he reaps there, and the reapings fall and wither, but ever he stops with each passing year to lay a fresh leaf of imperishable laurel upon the calm brow of him who lives forever.

Elliott Daingerfield. xxviii

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I Boyhood and Youth . . . v . . . 3

Birth and early life. Opposition of his family to Art. Grocery store episode. Early aspiration. First instructions. Ogden Haggerty.

Chapter I

Y j first recollection of my father was watching him paint a wash-tub, and the impression then made has never left me.

along the tub, leaving a long green streak; then he stepped back several paces and held his hand above his eyes and looked at the effect, a gesture and a position that were characteristic of my father throughout his life. This was repeated after every few strokes of the brush until the whole was complete, and there stood the tub in all its glory of green. It was so beautiful that I was almost frightened. Pop took me by the hand and led me from the room. From that time until we moved to the country, Medfield, Massachusetts, most of my memory seems to be a blank.

But before going into the Medfield period, which was one of the most important in my father's life, I want to go back and trace the early steps that led up to the achievements of those maturer years in Massachusetts.

Much has been written to give the impression that my father sprang from poor and humble folk, and that, like Benjamin West, the one-time president of the Royal Academy, and others, he had to resort to such measures as cutting off the cat's tail to obtain a paint-brush, and use the juice of huckleberry-pie and raspberry jam for colors with which to paint his masterpieces. Such things teach a fine moral for the school reader, but the obstacles with which my father had to contend in his early life were not financial ones.

i

GEORGE INNESS, JR.

His parents were well-to-do people and for the time in which they lived were considered rich.

My grandfather was a prosperous merchant of Scotch descent. He was energetic and thrifty and was ambitious for his children's success. Having made his fortune early in life he retired from active business and bought a farm near Newburg, New York, more, I fancy, for recreation than for profit. It was there on May 1, 1825, that George Inness was born. He was the fifth of thirteen children. All his brothers entered mercantile life and became very successful business men.

When George was only a few months old, and before the time of Hudson River boats, the elder Inness moved his family to New York in an antiquated vessel of some sort. George, being an infant, was laid in a basket so that the perilous journey might be more comfortably made.

Four years later they moved to Newark, New J ersey, where my father's boyhood was spent. Newark was then a little country town, and the Inness residence was on top of a high hill overlooking rich farm lands. Later this land was laid out in streets. My grandfather's house stood where High Street and Nesbit Street, now Central Avenue, meet in the heart of the great manufacturing center of Newark.