Pasture Lands

Inness painted this work at a pivotal point in his career, having already absorbed the lessons of the Barbizon School during his stays in France and Italy in the 1850s and early 1860s. By the late 1860s he was bringing that European sensibility to bear on the American pastoral, producing landscapes that differ markedly from the panoramic sublime of the Hudson River School. Where Bierstadt and Church pursued scale and geological drama, Inness sought intimacy and atmospheric unity. Pasture Lands belongs to the productive period when his handling was at its most assured and his interest in mood over spectacle was sharpening into what would become, in the 1880s and 1890s, a full Tonalist practice. The picture reflects his belief, shaped partly by Swedenborgian spirituality, that landscape painting should evoke an inner condition rather than document an outer fact. The grazing cattle are not picturesque accessories; they settle the scene into a convincing everyday rural calm that gives the atmospheric distances their meaning.