Sunrise in the Woods

Painted in 1887, near the end of Inness's career and during his most spiritually searching period, Sunrise in the Woods belongs squarely to the tradition of Tonalism that Inness himself helped define. Having moved away from the precise topographic ambitions of the Hudson River School in his earlier years, the mature Inness embraced a philosophy drawn from the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, whose ideas about correspondence between the natural world and spiritual states shaped Inness's belief that landscape painting should evoke rather than describe. By the 1880s his canvases had grown increasingly atmospheric, their edges dissolved, their palettes unified under a single key. Works from this decade were received with a mixture of admiration and puzzlement: critics accustomed to sharp contours found his late style evasive, while a growing circle of younger American painters recognized in it a new emotional register for landscape art. Today these late pictures are understood as the bridge between 19th-century American landscape tradition and the mood-driven interiors of Tonalist painters such as Dwight Tryon and Thomas Dewing.