George Inness: Writings and Reflections on Art and Philosophy

George Inness's key statements on ideas central to American social and cultural thought.

The writings of nineteenth-century American artists, such as Washington Allston, Asher B. Durand, and Thomas Cole, have long been considered essential expressions of the American creative perspective. Now, for the first time, the ideas of George Inness (1825-1894), one of America's greatest landscape painters, are assembled in one volume. George Inness: Writings and Reflections on Art and Philosophy reveals Inness to have been one of the most intelligent and knowledgeable public figures of his generation, an artist-philosopher not only deeply engaged with the history of art but also with ideas that resided at the center of American social and intellectual history.

In search of knowledge, Inness wrote and discoursed on evolutionary biology, science, mathematics, numerology, psychology, philosophy, and especially theology. This volume assembles the key sources, many hitherto unpublished, on Inness's ideas: his essays, poems, and letters; interviews and public debates with leading critics; comments in biographical profiles; and key passages from his biography, Life, Art, and Letters of George Inness. Together, these texts reveal Inness's discontent with the gradually diminishing authority of the divine from the story of human creation, a conflict at the center of nineteenth-century American religious and social thought and one that inspired Inness's own magnificent contributions to America's cultural heritage. 12 color illustrations, 10 in black and white.