To us as well as to himself this is the most beautiful period of his art, representing the maturity both of his method and ideal. Years of study and experiment have given his hand assurance and facility. It obeys the brain implicitly and with a readiness that does not put any drag upon the full, free play of the imagination. Its ideography is entirely personal, the brush work having been refined until in the most succinct and pregnant way it expresses precisely its author’s point of view. So personal is it that one may with equal certainty deduce the point of view from the method or trace back the method to the point of view. Ampleness and simplicity are the characteristics of each. The ampleness, however, is no longer of space but of significance; the vision, instead of being long-sighted, has become more penetrating and embracing; the artist is more thoroughly possessed of his subject. So, too, the simplicity involves no meagreness of thought, but a thought fully realized and clarified of everything that might detract from or confuse its meaning, having also a large suggestiveness, an expression of the artist’s imagination which invites the exercise of ours. At least such is the character of the brush work in his best pictures, for there are others in which the expanses of slightly broken colour, enlivened only by a few accents, are inclined to be a little uninteresting; succinct, in fact, without being also pregnant of meaning. If, however, they seem to be slight and sketchy, it is not because they were done without heart or care, but because Inness was constantly experimenting in the direction of more complete synthesis, wherein form for its own sake is less and less insisted on, and the great motive aimed at is the character of the scene, and the spirituality which it embodies--a motive, in fact, of interpretive impressionism.
In view of Inness’s impressionistic tendency that is a curious statement which has been credited to him, “While pre-Raphaelism is like a measure worm trying to compass the infinite circumference, impressionism is the sloth enveloped in its own eternal dulness.” If the remark was really made by him, it proves that he could be intolerant of others without trying to understand their motives. Both movements are naturalistic, and for that reason alone, if for no other, Inness might have tried to understand them; pre-Raphaelism, moreover, added to its devotion to the truth of form a profound spirituality, with which quality, at least, he should have felt some sympathy. Its motive, moreover, was in a measure humble. It certainly never tried to “compass the infinite circumference”; on the contrary, it limited itself to fragments and exaggerated their importance, pictorially speaking, in the general scheme. Even more misjudged is the application of a sloth to the analytical refinement and indefatigable study of the most eminent impressionists. It could not have been their search for the fugitive effects in nature or for the precise character of some phase of nature at a certain time that annoyed Inness, perhaps hardly the secondary place that they sometimes give to form. More likely it was their choice of a subject without due reference to the accepted conventions of pictorial composition and, I suspect, still more to their disregard of that other pictorial convention, tone. I am using the word “tone” to express the prevalence of some one colour in a picture to which all other hues are subordinated, and not in that other use of the word which involves the setting of all objects, lights, and colours in a picture in due relation to one another, within an _enveloppe_ of atmosphere. We have become inclined to regard “tonality” as a fetich, forgetting that it is after all only one of many admirable pictorial conventions, which, like other pictorial conventions, has no absolutely true counterpart in nature. No one can affirm conclusively that any one convention has a prescriptive superiority over all others. It is a matter to be adjusted by the temperament of the individual. In the neighbourhood of the Hudson we have days when the atmosphere is extraordinarily brilliant and the light clear white. I cannot recall any adequate expression of this in Inness’s pictures. He was drawn rather to early mornings, to evenings, to quiet afternoons, or the golden glow of summer and autumn, when the atmosphere is caressing.