Moonrise (1887)

George Inness was one of the most influential American landscape painters of the nineteenth century, associated first with the Hudson River School and later with a more personal, atmospheric style influenced by the Barbizon painters and by the theology of Emanuel Swedenborg. He believed painting should convey spiritual states through landscape, and his late work moved increasingly toward soft, dissolved forms and tonal unity. Moonrise is from 1887, deep in this late period. A large orange-gold moon rises behind a dark cluster of trees at center, its light reflected in a small pond or stream below. A solitary figure sits at the water's edge at left. The rest of the composition is near-dark — deep greens, browns, and a heavy sky grading from gray-blue to warm brown at the top. The signature and date are in the lower left corner.