October

Inness painted October in 1886, a period when he had settled permanently in Montclair, New Jersey, and was deepening his engagement with the philosophy of Emanuel Swedenborg, whose doctrine of correspondences between the material and spiritual worlds shaped the artist's belief that landscape painting could carry inner meaning without resorting to allegory or narrative. By this point Inness had long since moved beyond the precise topography of the Hudson River School tradition in which he had trained, and his late canvases dissolve the boundary between observed fact and felt atmosphere. Critics of the 1880s debated whether his increasingly soft, dissolved manner was a refinement or a surrender of craft; today those late works are understood as the foundation of American Tonalism, anticipating the mood-driven landscapes of Dwight William Tryon and Thomas Dewing. October was exhibited during Inness's lifetime to considerable acclaim and entered major American collections as evidence of what one contemporary reviewer called "the most lyric feeling in American landscape." The Art Institute of Chicago, which holds the canvas, regards it as one of the definitive statements of the artist's final style.