May Object of the Month: “Landscape with Cattle” by George Inness

GEORGE INNESS

Landscape with Cattle, c. 1860

Oil on panel, approx. 7 x 11 ¾ in.

LG-C-1937

One of the most celebrated landscape painters of nineteenth-century America, George Inness was born in Newburgh, New York in 1825 and was raised in New York City and Newark, New Jersey. By 1853 his interest in painting took him to France, where he studied the popular style of the Barbizon School which touted the merits of painting outdoors to capture the spirit of the natural world. He especially admired the canvases of Théodore Rousseau, the most radical of all Barbizon artists. Rousseau’s brushy, hazed, ethereal style would have a lasting impact on Inness’s American production. Inness’s circa 1860 Landscape with Cattle is an embodiment of this mystical style and a treasure of the Locust Grove collection. Depicting a small group of cattle clustered in the foreground of a grassy meadow set beneath the pastel colors of a sunset sky, this bucolic landscape conveys a sense of peace Inness believed could be found in rural life.

Landscape with Cattle was purchased by Innis Young on December 13, 1945 at Parke-Bernet Galleries in New York City. No extant records record why Young selected the picture for purchase. Perhaps he liked the symmetries between his own name, Innis, and that of the painter, Inness. Or maybe he saw in the peaceful qualities of the picture a reflection of his own home in the Hudson Valley.

George Inness’s Landscape with Cattle exhibits the artist’s signature tonalism, marked by the expressive treatment of form and the atmospheric depiction of light. Tonalism was a movement in American art that emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In tonalist landscapes, natural forms were depicted with an overall tone of colored atmosphere or mist. These compositions were designed to create a moody, poetic vision of the landscape. In the trees of Inness’s Landscape with Cattle, for example, the distant foliage is partially dissolved by atmospheric light. There is a careful dabbing of green and dark brown shadow over the light brown and, in places, orange tones of the ground. An enamel-like blending of thin colors over the blue sky enhances the sunset scene, and red glazes bleed onto the tree on the right, the distant trees, and parts of the foreground. Deeply felt compositions like this one reflect George Inness’s commitment to the Swedenborgian belief in the existence of a relationship between the natural and spiritual realms.

It is possible that this bucolic scene represents the area around Medfield, Massachusetts, where George Inness lived in the early 1860s. In a meaningful turn, Innis Young—who purchased this painting in 1945—attended boarding school less than twenty miles away in Milton, Massachusetts at the Milton Academy before graduating from Harvard University in 1914. Although Innis Young was almost completely deaf by the time he was a young man, he nevertheless enjoyed a wide range of cultural pursuits. He was a frequent traveler and collector of fine antiques. Many of the paintings and pieces of furniture that he purchased over the years, including Landscape with Cattle, were exhibited in his home in New Haven, Connecticut before coming to Locust Grove. Innis purchased a few other paintings in the 1940s that remain in the Locust Grove collection, including a landscape by Samuel Morse now in the Morse Gallery, and a portrait of the Countess of Jersey by Richard Cosway now in the Drawing Room.

By 1949, Innis was diagnosed with colon cancer and underwent the first of several surgeries that summer. After 1950, he spent most of his time at Locust Grove with his sister Annette Young. He died there of complications from colon cancer in 1953. Comforting Innis during this painful period, George Inness’s painting brought peace from its position over the door of his bedroom at Locust Grove. It still hangs there today, a tranquil reminder of the connection between the natural and spiritual realms.

Innis Young standing on the porch at Locust Lawn during one of his “organizing the house” days, part of an initiative to open it for tours in 1950