The Museum’s impressive Landscape, with its meadows, lone traveler, and distant hills under a serenely blue sky, was painted during a rich period of activity following Inness’s third trip to Europe from 1870 to 1875. Most of that stay was spent in Italy; his previous trip abroad in 1851–52 allowed him to see the Old Master paintings that had influenced his early work through engravings and print sources. A year in Paris in 1853 introduced Inness to the artists of the Barbizon School, which would have an immediate impact on his work in a freer handling of paint, the use of brighter colors, and new emphasis on rectilinear composition.³ These influences are apparent in the Museum’s painting, in the subtle tonality and color harmonies characteristic of Charles-François Daubigny (1817–1878) as well as in the implied sense of portent or meaning in the natural scene, a hallmark of the landscapes of Théodore Rousseau (1812–1867). Although its brightness of palette may also reflect the artist’s knowledge of Impressionism, which Inness dismissed as a "mere passing fad,"⁴ the Museum’s canvas is ultimately more closely related to the poetic landscapes of the Barbizon painters than to the optical effects of their successors.

The inscribed date "1877" places the Museum’s painting a year before Inness moved to Montclair, New Jersey,⁵ where he would maintain a home, with trips to England, Florida, California, and Mexico, until his death in 1894 during a journey abroad. Before settling in New Jersey, the artist had returned in 1875 from an extended stay in Italy and France to the village of Medfield, Massachusetts. He was also active in New York City in 1876–77 and maintained a studio there. Although a number of landscapes from 1877, the year the Museum’s canvas was painted, have "Pompton" (New Jersey) in their titles, Inness scholar Michael Quick has pointed out that most of these subjects are lake or riverine landscapes, unlike the broad, sunny meadows depicted in Landscape.⁶

Inness would often revisit and rework certain motifs throughout his career; his place of residence at the time a canvas was painted may or may not have relevance to the subject, a fact borne out by the number of Italian landscapes produced several years after his return to the United States⁷.  It is likely, as Michael Quick believes, that Landscape represents a synthetic, ideal composition like Inness’s other works from 1877 that are "consciously composed" rather than depicting a particular site.⁸

Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., has written of the distinctly theoretical nature of the artist’s landscapes during the 1870s and especially of his use of color, which was influenced not only by formal and artistic concerns but by spiritual beliefs.⁹ Raised in a religious household, Inness was drawn as an adult to the philosophical tenets of the eighteenth-century Swedish visionary Emanuel Swedenborg, which became especially important in his later life and work.¹⁰ Inness’s first significant involvement with the Swedenborgian sect came during his stay in 1864–66 in Eagleswood, an intellectual community in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where he joined the artist William Page (1811–1885), an adherent to the faith, in forming a fledgling art colony.¹¹ Attracted by Swedenborg’s emphasis on "living religion in everyday life" and the "spiritual significance of the visible world,"¹² Inness also responded to his theories of correspondences between the material and the immaterial. The artist’s inclusion of a traveler in the Museum’s Landscape, pack on his back and stick in hand, may refer to another Swedenborgian concept of the journey of spiritual regeneration.

Inness had described the theme of spiritual journeys in relation to a painting belonging to his series of three allegorical works, Triumph of the Cross (1867), based on John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress:

In this picture...I have endeavored to convey...an impression of the state into which the soul comes when it begins to advance toward a spiritual life, or toward any more perfected state in its journey until it arrives to its sabbath or rest. Here the pilgrim is leaving the natural light....His light hereafter must be that of faith alone.¹³

Without suggesting that the Museum’s Landscape was intended as a pictorial religious tract, it is still possible to see an implied narrative or meaning in the image of the traveler, who may be engaged in a spiritual as well as earthly journey. As he walks on the path from one light in the background of the painting toward the light of the foreground, his literal progress through the landscape can also be seen as a symbolic journey of faith. The central lone tree becomes a visual analogue for the traveler,
a relationship already made apparent in the earlier nature study Leeds, New York. Although Inness used this kind of pairing as a compositional device in other paintings, where an anonymous figure, shepherd, or farmworker might be seen in counterpoint with a prominent tree, here the unusual use of a figure identified as a traveler may add meaning to the scene beyond the formal concerns of composition. Like the traveler, the tree occupies a place between two areas (and symbolically, two kinds) of light. As a bridge between heaven and earth, the tree, rooted in the landscape, extends its crown of branches and leaves above the horizon line and into the richly painted blues, pinks, and lavenders of Inness’s radiant, cloud-filled sky.

1. When the Museum acquired the painting, its title was given as New Jersey Landscape, but Ireland 1965 records it simply as Landscape without suggestion of a specific site.
   The bill of sale (Museum files) of Apr. 20, 1960, from Shore Studio Galleries, Boston, to Frank L. Harrington lists the painting as “Landscape painting by George Inness...probably painted around Montclair N.J.”
2. For Inness’s early training and career see Cikovsky in New York +, Metropolitan 1985, pp. 10–43. The present essay is indebted to this scholar’s work, including Cikovsky 1971 and Cikovsky 1993, and especially to the assistance of Michael Quick, Project Director, Inness catalogue raisonné.
3. Cikovsky, 1971, pp. 28–31.
4. New York Herald, Aug. 22, 1894. Although Inness was in Paris in 1874, it is not known whether
   he saw the First Impressionist exhibition then or discovered the Impressionists later. (Cikovsky 1971, p. 44, adds, however, that Inness’s later style and increased colorism may have owed something to the influence of the Impressionist palette.)
5. Gail Stavitsky, in Montclair + 1994, p. 9, describes Montclair during Inness’s residency as a “rural township of four thousand residents...composed of farms, vast fields and large old orchards, which fired the artist’s intense powers of observation, memory and imagination.” She also states that Inness joined a “thriving art community” that over the years included Charles Parsons (1821–1910), Harry Fenn (1838/45–1911), Thomas Ball (1819–1911), Jonathan Scott Hartley (1845–1911), Thomas R. Manley (1853–1938) and Frederick Ballard Williams (1871–1956).
6. In a letter to the author (Sept. 18, 1996, Museum files), Michael Quick wrote: “We know that Inness, still residing in New York, painted in New Jersey during the summer of 1877. These paintings, which often have ‘Pompton’ in their titles, generally are river or lake scenes unlike [the Museum’s landscape].”
7. Cikovsky, in Los Angeles +,
   1985, p. 96 (notes on no. 10, On the Delaware, c. 1861–63; Ireland 1965, no. 231).
8. Regarding the issue of identifying the site of the Museum’s painting, Quick wrote (letter cited in note 8 above): “Other paintings of 1877, such as Ireland 819, 820 and 821, have been identified as Medfield, Massachusetts, but do not bear a
   persuasive resemblance to the place as I know it. What is characteristic of these last-mentioned paintings is that they are quite consciously composed out of landscape elements made to fit into a geometrical order. My sense of [the Museum’s painting] is that it is a synthetic, ideal composition, in which some may see a resemblance to Medfield, others to Leeds, and yet others to some part
   of New Jersey.”
9. Cikovsky, 1971, pp. 57–59; New York +, Metropolitan 1985, pp. 30–31. See also Quick in Montclair + 1994, pp. 29–32
10. For a recent discussion of Inness’s association with Swedenborgianism, see Promey 1994. She extends the critical knowledge of the artist’s involvement with the Swedenborgian religion and its effect on his color theory as well as providing extensive bibliographical references to the literature on this topic.
11. See ibid., p. 47, for a description of Eagleswood and Inness’s association with this community, established at Perth Amboy following the utopian Raritan Bay Union.
12. Ibid., p. 55.
13. Ibid., pp. 52–53.