Sunrise - George Inness, 1887

By the mid-1880s, George Inness had decisively left behind the precise topographic concerns of the Hudson River School he had once engaged and was painting in a mode shaped by his deep commitment to the doctrines of Emanuel Swedenborg, the mystic philosopher who held that visible nature is a correspondence of spiritual states. Sunrise, completed in the final decade of Inness's life, belongs to this mature series of atmospheric American landscapes in which specific place yields entirely to mood and inner light. Inness spent much of this period working in Montclair, New Jersey, and in the Catskill and Medici landscapes, translating open meadows and woodland edges into near-monochrome harmonies of gold and green. Works from this period were collected avidly during his lifetime and have since entered major American museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Critics of the day recognized that Inness had moved well beyond Impressionism's interest in optical sensation toward something more interior: a painting practice in which dissolved edges and unified tone carry emotional and spiritual weight rather than mere atmospheric observation.