Summer, Montclair

George Inness distinguished himself among the Hudson River School painters with his lifelong pursuit of a more modern aesthetic of landscape painting. Unlike his contemporaries who focused chiefly on creating realistic canvases of nature's vastness, Inness felt that "paintings were not necessarily pictures, and it was the artist's function, even his obligation, by an aesthetic and expressive reorganization, to interpret nature and not merely depict it." (N. Cikovsky, Jr., M. Quick, George Inness, Los Angeles, California, 1985, p. 19) In his paintings, particularly evident in his later works, Inness sought to capture more elusive and spiritual aspects of nature on his canvas. In the final decade of his life, he produced an extraordinary series of landscapes that are highly subjective and modern in approach. Summer, Montclair from 1887 epitomizes the artist's interest in looking at landscape painting in a new way, and his quest to bring a deeper emotional component into his compositions. Painted just seven years prior to his death, Summer, Montclair encapsulates Inness's exploration of atmospheric changes and expression through his sophisticated use of color and light.

Following a retrospective exhibition organized by the American Art Association in 1884, Inness devoted himself to achieving a complete synthesis of formal portrayal of nature and art as a means to express emotion. The central component of this synthesis was color, which he described as 'the soul of a painting.' Forms, on the other hand, though still based in the observation of nature, were softened by atmospheric effects and dissolved by light. Inness relished in capturing the colors of changing seasons and times of day, and works such as Summer, Montclair underscore the artist's signature style of the late 1880s.

Summer, Montclair was painted after the artist's decision to settle permanently in the small town of Montclair. Residing full-time in the quiet New Jersey countryside enabled Inness to focus intently on the changing atmospheric conditions of the day and season. In the present work, Inness has depicted the moments following a brief rainstorm and its subsequent effects on the landscape. Summer, Montclair depicts a lush generously-sized pasture with a townscape in the distance, as evidenced by a church spire and red-roofed buildings jutting upwards beyond the tree line in the background. A herd of cattle quietly graze in a sunlit spot in the middle-ground, while a babbling brook in the foreground is nearly fully enveloped in shadow. The ominous storm cloud slowly makes it way out of the composition, allowing scattered spots of blue sky to peek out from behind the remaining dense cloud cover. Using color as a vehicle for expression, Inness has employed a saturated palette of vibrant greens and blues to relay a feeling of renewed hope after the passing storm. While areas of the landscape still appear hazy and damp, the contrasting sun-drenched middle-ground and dappled blue sky imbues the work with a sense of revitalization, leading the viewer to believe that the warm sunlight will fully bathe the composition in just a few moments.

All of the artistic devices evident in Summer, Montclair work together to fully reveal Inness' complete synthesis of nature. The painting's contrasting areas of light and shadow and dramatic color scheme induce the spiritual response that Inness strove to achieve in the last decade of his career.