Landscape—Figures in a Field

Although his early landscapes show the influence of the Hudson River School, Inness’s trips to Italy in 1850, France in 1853Ð54, and both countries in 1870-74 had a profound effect on his work. While in Europe, Inness was greatly impressed by the Barbizon School of landscape painting, with its emphasis on tonality. From 1880 forward, his landscapes became less literal and more personal visions of nature. His independent and poetic style, with light as its true subject, emerged at about the same time that Impressionism was gaining strength; Inness’s isolated vignettes of nature, with their small figures, are some of his most accomplished paintings. Landscape (Figures in a Field), an example of his late style, is probably not a topographical depiction of a particular place but rather a poetic vision of a scene, depicted in a sweeping, summary style that only generally suggests landscape forms; the subject here is the mood of the scene, communicated by light filtering through mist and haze. (From “A Handbook of the Collection: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art,” 1998)