George Inness and the Science of Landscape
George Inness and the Science of Landscape

Author: Rachael Z. DeLue

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2008-09-15

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0226142310

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George Inness (1825-94), long considered one of America's greatest landscape painters, has yet to receive his full due from scholars and critics. A complicated artist and thinker, Inness painted stunningly beautiful, evocative views of the American countryside. Less interested in representing the details of a particular place than in rendering the "subjective mystery of nature," Inness believed that capturing the spirit or essence of a natural scene could point to a reality beyond the physical or, as Inness put it, "the reality of the unseen." Throughout his career, Inness struggled to make visible what was invisible to the human eye by combining a deep interest in nineteenth-century scientific inquiry—including optics, psychology, physiology, and mathematics—with an idiosyncratic brand of mysticism. Rachael Ziady DeLue's George Inness and the Science of Landscape—the first in-depth examination of Inness's career to appear in several decades—demonstrates how the artistic, spiritual, and scientific aspects of Inness's art found expression in his masterful landscapes. In fact, Inness's practice was not merely shaped by his preoccupation with the nature and limits of human perception; he conceived of his labor as a science in its own right. This lavishly illustrated work reveals Inness as profoundly invested in the science and philosophy of his time and illuminates the complex manner in which the fields of art and science intersected in nineteenth-century America. Long-awaited, this reevaluation of one of the major figures of nineteenth-century American art will prove to be a seminal text in the fields of art history and American studies.

Haunted Visions
Haunted Visions

Author: Charles Colbert

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2011-05-10

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 0812204999

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Spiritualism emerged in western New York in 1848 and soon achieved a wide following due to its claim that the living could commune with the dead. In Haunted Visions: Spiritualism and American Art, Charles Colbert focuses on the ways Spiritualism imbued the making and viewing of art with religious meaning and, in doing so, draws fascinating connections between art and faith in the Victorian age. Examining the work of such well-known American artists as James Abbott McNeill Whistler, William Sydney Mount, and Robert Henri, Colbert demonstrates that Spiritualism played a critical role in the evolution of modern attitudes toward creativity. He argues that Spiritualism made a singular contribution to the sanctification of art that occurred in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The faith maintained that spiritual energies could reside in objects, and thus works of art could be appreciated not only for what they illustrated but also as vessels of the psychic vibrations their creators impressed into them. Such beliefs sanctified both the making and collecting of art in an era when Darwinism and Positivism were increasingly disenchanting the world and the efforts to represent it. In this context, Spiritualism endowed the artist's profession with the prestige of a religious calling; in doing so, it sought not to replace religion with art, but to make art a site where religion happened.

The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art
The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art

Author: Joan M. Marter

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 3140

ISBN-13: 0195335791

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Arranged in alphabetical order, these 5 volumes encompass the history of the cultural development of America with over 2300 entries.

The Smith College Museum of Art
The Smith College Museum of Art

Author: Smith College. Museum of Art

Publisher: Hudson Hills

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9781555951948

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Smith College art professors Davis and Leshko showcase 100 paintings and sculptures from their institution's vaunted collection, encompassing Americans from Gilbert Stuart to Louise Nevelson and Europeans from Corot to Henry Moore. In the introduction, how and why Smith became steward of such a fine body of work is ascribed to the school's high-minded mission and its generous alumni donors. The rest of the book is divided into two sections, one American and the other European. Each individual full-color reproduction is accompanied by an informative one-page essay and a brief reading list. During several years of renovations at Smith, the items featured in this book are traveling to diverse sites, which should increase the book's appeal. 118 colour & 1 b/w illustrations

George Inness and the Visionary Landscape
George Inness and the Visionary Landscape

Author: Adrienne Baxter Bell

Publisher: George Braziller

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13:

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The landscape painter George Inness (1825-1894) was one of the foremost American artists of his generation. Born in Newburgh, New York, Inness studied the works of the old masters and, as a young man, painted in the reigning style of the Hudson River School. Within a few years, however, he found himself more attuned to the gestural, expressive approach of the Barbizon School. He greatly admired the free handling of paint and the expression of soulfulness in the works of Theodore Rousseau. Equally important were Inness's philosophical and spiritual concerns. Along with contemporaries Ralph Waldo Emerson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Walt Whitman, Inness studied the writings of the Swedish scientist-turned-mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). During a trip to Italy in the early 1870s, Inness began to structure his landscapes around geometric forms, a development that may have reflected the Swedenborgian idea that the natural world corresponds to the spiritual world and that geometric forms possess spiritual identities. Through these and other compositional devices, Inness created paintings to inspire an almost "religious experience" in his viewers. George Inness and the Visionary Landscape includes forty color reproductions of Inness's most important paintings and presents both a chronological overview of Inness's life and a more focused treatment of the artist's main philosophical and religious preoccupations. It suggests resonances between Inness's visionary landscapes and the concurrent efforts, on the part of the psychologist/philosopher William James (1842-1910), to validate the existence of mystical states of mind. It shows Inness to have anticipated many of the most importanttenets of modernism, an achievement that continues to inspire contemporary audiences.

An American View
An American View

Author: Brooklyn Museum

Publisher: Giles

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13:

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"This new volume accompanies and complements the publication of the two-volume authoritative catalogue of the Brooklyn Museum's collection of American paintings by artists born by 1876. It provides a richly illustrated general survey of American painting from the late colonial era to the early years of the twentieth century, as presented in sixty-four of the Museum's most significant paintings by American artists. Each painting is illustrated in color, and the selected works are arranged in four broad chronological sections: early American art; art of the 1830s to 1850s; American painting in the Civil War era; and cosmopolitan painting of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Extended captions present the key features of each painting and artist, and of the wider artistic context of the work and the period in which it was produced."--BOOK JACKET.