Peace and Plenty

Inness completed Peace and Plenty in 1865, the very year the Civil War ended, and the painting's allegorical intent was immediately legible to contemporary audiences. He had spent the war years deeply troubled by the national crisis, and this canvas was understood from its first exhibition as a declaration that the republic had survived and that its landscape, its farms and its abundance endured. The work draws on the tradition of the Hudson River School, with its luminous American panorama and its faith in the redemptive power of the national landscape, yet it also points toward the direction Inness would travel in the 1870s and 1880s: away from topographic precision and toward the looser, more spiritually charged atmospheric painting that critics would come to call Tonalism. The balance between those two impulses, the documentary breadth of the Hudson River tradition and the dissolving, feeling-first approach of his later work, makes this canvas one of the most carefully weighted compositions of his career. It entered the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where it has long been regarded as one of his defining statements, and it was exhibited widely to critical acclaim in the years following its completion, praised for the sincerity of its patriotic feeling and the authority of its technique.