Submitting to the Indefinable: George Inness and the Language of Nature

By Adrienne Baxter Bell, Ph.D., Professor of Art History, Marymount Manhattan College, New York

1 June 2024 | talk at 12:00 | Lunch with RSVP 11:30

When asked, toward the end of his life, what he did when he “grew weary of painting,” the American landscape painter George Inness (1825-1894) replied, “Then, I take to theology. That is the only thing except art which interests me.” Known primarily as a Tonalist, Inness was, in fact, devoted to the metaphysical philosophy of Emanuel Swedenborg. In this lecture, Dr. Bell will provide an overview of Inness’s life and work; she will then outline some of the ways in which Inness, through his art, reflected his understanding of Swedenborgian doctrine. In these efforts, he broke from the prevailing style of nineteenth-century American landscape painting and established some fundamental principles of modernism. More important, he activated in his viewers, then and now, their powers of contemplation, their imagination, and their spiritual reverie.