Landscape With Yellow Bush

George Inness painted this work in the early 1880s, during the most productive and philosophically engaged decade of his career. By that point Inness had moved decisively away from the topographical ambitions of the Hudson River School and toward what critics would later call Tonalism: a mode of American landscape painting defined by near-monochrome atmospheric unity, dissolved outlines and a deliberate suppression of narrative incident. Inness was also a committed follower of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, and his late canvases, including this one, are shaped by that faith's conviction that the visible world is a continuous correspondence of spiritual states. The warm, enveloping light of the clearing is not merely meteorological; it carries the weight of an interior condition. Inness had exhibited widely at the National Academy of Design and at international expositions throughout the 1870s, and his late landscapes were collected avidly during his lifetime and after, entering major American museum holdings including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Among his contemporaries he was considered the greatest American landscape painter of his generation, and his influence on painters such as J. Francis Murphy and Alexander Wyant was direct and acknowledged.