Sunset

1861

Included in both LeRoy Ireland's Catalogue Raisonne (1965) and Michael Quick's Catalogue Raisonne (2007). In this pastoral scene of Medfield, Massachusetts, George Inness employed the modern (in 1861) and controversial style of painting known as Barbizon. The French Barbizon painters sought to portray the countryside naturally, with peasants and animals, trees and earth, rendered in soft, muted tones of green, brown and gold. Inness was energized by this method of painting with which he became familiar on his sojourn in France in the 1850s. He abandoned the techniques of the American Hudson River School, which advocated detailed, panoramic vistas, for a more painterly, suggestive style. In Sunset, Inness was also beginning to paint light with an almost religious intensity; his explorations in form and color on canvas during the remainder of his career made Inness arguably the greatest nineteenth century American landscape painter.

Medfield, Massachusetts

Oil on canvas

frame: 36 in x 46 in; canvas: 26 in x 35 3/4 in

Bequest of Miss Elizabeth H. Swinburne

1919.002.001