GEORGE INNESS (1825-1884)
Lagazuoi (2,835m- 9,301ft)
Italy
In Apezzo Pass, Titian's House, 1876, oil on canvas, Portland Art Museum
The mountain
Lagazuoi (2,835m- 9,301ft) is a mountain in the Dolomites of northern Italy, about 18 kilometres (11 mi) southwest by road from Cortina d'Ampezzo in the Veneto Region. It is accessible by cable car and contains the Rifugio Lagazuoi, a mountain refuge situated beyond the northwest corner of Cima del Lago. The mountain range is well known for its wartime tunnels and First World War mine warfare. The extensive tunnels were built by the Italian troops trying to wrest control from Austro-Hungarian troops who also built tunnels. The tunnels are now open as a de facto museum.
The painter
George Inness was one of the most influential American artists of the nineteenth century, often called "the father of American landscape painting" . He was influenced, in turn, by the Old Masters, the Hudson River school, the Barbizon school, and, finally, the theology of Emanuel Swedenborg, whose spiritualism found vivid expression in the work of Inness's maturity (1879–1894). Although Inness’s style evolved through distinct stages over a prolific career that spanned more than forty years and 1,000 paintings, his works consistently earned acclaim for their powerful, coordinated efforts to elicit depth of mood, atmosphere, and emotion. Neither pure realist nor impressionist, Inness was a transitional figure who intended for his works to combine both the earthly and the ethereal in order to capture the complete essence of a locale. A master of light, color, and shadow, he became noted for creating highly ordered and complex scenes that often juxtaposed hazy or blurred elements with sharp and refined details to evoke an interweaving of both the physical and the spiritual nature of experience. In Inness’s words, he attempted through his art to demonstrate the "reality of the unseen” and to connect the "visible upon the invisible."
Within his own lifetime, art critics hailed Inness as one of America's greatest artists. Inness is best known for his mature works that not only exemplified the Tonalist movement but also displayed an original and uniquely American style.