The Storm

By the mid-1880s, George Inness had completed his decisive turn away from the precise panoramic landscapes of the Hudson River School that shaped his early career. Having spent formative years in Italy and France in the 1850s, he absorbed the tonal discipline of the Barbizon School painters, particularly Corot and Rousseau, and returned to America committed to painting mood and inner feeling rather than topographic accuracy. The Storm belongs to a suite of weather paintings Inness produced in this decade, works in which meteorological drama became a vehicle for what he described as the landscape's spiritual dimension, shaped in part by his deep commitment to Swedenborgian theology. Tonalism, the movement Inness helped to define, finds one of its more energetic expressions here: the palette is not yet the near-monochrome dissolution of his very late work, but the light is already unified, filtered, and emotionally weighted rather than descriptively brilliant. The painting has been held in major American institutional collections and is widely cited as evidence of the transition in Inness's output from his middle period toward the atmospheric Tonalist canvases of his final years.